initial commit of ebook 5127HEADmain

31 files changed, 33183 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/5127-0.txt b/5127-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c960fa2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7567 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, by
+Andrew Lang
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2015  [eBook #5127]
+[This file was first posted on May 5, 2002]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT
+UNKNOWN***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+   [Picture: Shakespeare’s Monument at Stratford-on-Avon (1616–1623?)]
+
+
+
+
+
+                               SHAKESPEARE
+                                  BACON
+                          AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                               ANDREW LANG
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                         WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                         LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
+                       39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
+                      NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
+                                   1912
+
+                           All rights reserved
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    TO
+                          HORACE HOWARD FURNESS
+                             IN MEMORY OF AN
+                               OLD PROMISE
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+IT is with some hesitation that I give my husband’s last book to the
+world.  It was in type when he died, but he had no time to correct even
+the first proofs, and doubtless he would have made many changes, if not
+in his views at least in his expression of them.  Mr. Bartram has
+verified the quotations and dates with infinite care, and for this he has
+my warmest thanks.  For the rest I can but ask those who differ from the
+author to remember the circumstances in which the work has been
+published.
+
+                                                                  L. B. L.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+           INTRODUCTION                                           xiii
+       I.  THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN POSITIONS                   1
+      II.  THE “SILENCE” ABOUT SHAKESPEARE                          25
+     III.  THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE—THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE          41
+      IV.  MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE’S LEARNING                    65
+       V.  SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY                         83
+      VI.  THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST”               119
+     VII.  CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS AUTHOR              133
+    VIII.  “THE SILENCE OF PHILIP HENSLOWE”                        153
+      IX.  THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE—HIS MONUMENT AND          167
+           PORTRAITS
+       X.  “THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE”                             193
+      XI.  THE FIRST FOLIO                                         205
+     XII.  BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE                              235
+    XIII.  THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON                             271
+           APPENDIX I.—“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”                      293
+           APPENDIX II.—CHETTLE’S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL        302
+           SHAKSPERE
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+SHAKESPEARE’S MONUMENT AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON             _Frontispiece_
+(1616–1623?)
+COPY OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST,”                   12
+1598.  The earliest title-page in which
+Shakespeare’s name is given as the author of the
+work.
+
+ _From_ J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS’ _Outlines of the
+                Life of Shakespeare_
+FACSIMILE OF THE AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE “BY ME WILLIAM                 47
+SHAKSPEARE.”  From one of the Three Sheets of his
+Will, dated _March_ 25, 1616.
+
+  _From_ SIR SIDNEY LEE’S _Shakespeare’s Life and
+ Work_.  _By permission of_ Messrs. SMITH, ELDER &
+                        Co.
+
+FACSIMILE OF MARK-SIGNATURE OF JOHN SHAKESPEARE,
+THE POET’S FATHER.  From a Deed of Conveyance,
+dated _January_ 26, 1596
+
+ _From_ J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS’ _Outlines of the
+                Life of Shakespeare_
+
+FACSIMILE OF MARK-SIGNATURE OF JUDITH SHAKESPEARE,
+THE POET’S SECOND DAUGHTER, AFTERWARDS MRS. THOMAS
+QUINEY
+
+_From_ J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS’ _Outlines of the
+Life of Shakespeare_
+THE MONUMENT IN DUGDALE’S “HISTORY OF THE                          178
+ANTIQUITIES OF WARWICKSHIRE” (1656)
+
+       _With permission of_ JOHN MURRAY, Esq.
+THE CAREW MONUMENT IN STRATFORD CHURCH                        180, 181
+
+THE CAREW MONUMENT AS REPRESENTED IN DUGDALE’S
+“HISTORY OF THE ANTIQUITIES OF WARWICKSHIRE” (1656)
+FROM VERTUE’S ENGRAVING OF THE MONUMENT (1725)                     185
+
+       _With permission of_ JOHN MURRAY, ESQ.
+LONDON IN THE YEAR 1610, SHOWING THE GLOBE THEATRE                 298
+IN THE FOREGROUND
+
+ _From_ J. O. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS’ _Outlines of the
+                Life of Shakespeare_
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+THE theory that Francis Bacon was, in the main, the author of
+“Shakespeare’s plays,” has now been for fifty years before the learned
+world.  Its advocates have met with less support than they had reason to
+expect.  Their methods, their logic, and their hypotheses closely
+resemble those applied by many British and foreign scholars to Homer; and
+by critics of the very Highest School to Holy Writ.  Yet the Baconian
+theory is universally rejected in England by the professors and
+historians of English literature; and generally by students who have no
+profession save that of Letters.  The Baconians, however, do not lack the
+countenance and assistance of highly distinguished persons, whose names
+are famous where those of mere men of letters are unknown; and in circles
+where the title of “Professor” is not duly respected.
+
+The partisans of Bacon aver (or one of them avers) that “Lord Penzance,
+Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Palmerston, Judge Webb, Judge Holmes (of
+Kentucky, U.S.), Prince Bismarck, John Bright, and innumerable most
+_thoughtful scholars eminent in many walks of life_, _and especially in
+__the legal profession_ . . . ” have been Baconians, or, at least,
+opposed to Will Shakspere’s authorship.  To these names of scholars I
+must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens, D.Litt. of Oxford;
+better known to many as Mark Twain.  Dr. Clemens was, indeed, no mean
+literary critic; witness his epoch-making study of Prof. Dowden’s _Life
+of Shelley_, while his researches into the biography of Jeanne d’Arc were
+most conscientious.
+
+With the deepest respect for the political wisdom and literary taste of
+Lord Palmerston, Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and the late Mr.
+John Bright; and with every desire to humble myself before the judicial
+verdicts of Judges Holmes, Webb, and Lord Penzance; with sincere
+admiration of my late friend, Dr. Clemens, I cannot regard them as, in
+the first place and professionally, trained students of literary history.
+
+They were no more specially trained students of Elizabethan literature
+than myself; they were amateurs in this province, as I am an amateur, who
+differ from all of them in opinion.  Difference of opinion concerning
+points of literary history ought not to make “our angry passions rise.”
+Yet this controversy has been extremely bitter.
+
+I abstain from quoting the “sweetmeats,” in Captain MacTurk’s phrase,
+which have been exchanged by the combatants.  Charges of ignorance and
+monomania have been answered by charges of forgery, lying, “scandalous
+literary dishonesty,” and even inaccuracy.  Now no mortal is infallibly
+accurate, but we are all sane and “indifferent honest.”  There have been
+forgeries in matters Shakespearean, alas, but not in connection with the
+Baconian controversy.
+
+It is an argument of the Baconians, and generally of the impugners of
+good Will’s authorship of the plays vulgarly attributed to him, that the
+advocates of William Shakspere, Gent, as author of the plays, differ like
+the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points.  All do not believe,
+with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles, Euripides, and Æschylus
+(but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr. Swinburne did, or knew them at
+all—for that matter.  Mr. Pollard differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee
+on points concerning the First Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are
+with Mr. Pollard.  Few, if any, partisans of Will agree with Mrs. Stopes
+(herself no Baconian) about the history of the Stratford monument of the
+poet.  About Will’s authorship of _Titus Andronicus_, and _Henry VI_,
+Part I, the friends of Will, like the friends of Bacon, are at odds among
+themselves.  These and other divergencies of opinion cause the Baconians
+to laugh, as if _they_ were a harmonious circle . . . !  For the Baconian
+camp is not less divided against itself than the camp of the
+“Stratfordians.”  Not all Baconians hold that Bacon was the legitimate
+son of “that Imperial votaress” Queen Elizabeth.  Not all believe in the
+Cryptogram of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, or in any other cryptograms.  Not
+all maintain that Bacon, in the Sonnets, was inspired by a passion for
+the Earl of Essex, for Queen Elizabeth, or for an early miniature of
+himself.  Not all regard him as the author of the plays of Kit Marlowe.
+Not all suppose him to be a Rosicrucian, who possibly died at the age of
+a hundred and six, or, perhaps, may be “still running.”  Not all aver
+that he wrote thirteen plays before 1593.  But one party holds that, in
+the main, Will was the author of the plays, while the other party votes
+for Bacon—or for Bungay, a Great Unknown.  I use Bungay as an endearing
+term for the mysterious being who was the Author if Francis Bacon was
+not.  Friar Bungay was the rival of Friar Bacon, as the Unknown (if he
+was not Francis Bacon) is the rival of “the inventor of Inductive
+reasoning.”
+
+I could never have expected that I should take a part in this
+controversy; but acquaintance with _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_
+(503 pp.), (1908), and later works of Mr. G. G. Greenwood, M.P., has
+tempted me to enter the lists.
+
+Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is learned (and
+I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and Judge Holmes were
+rather ignorant).  He is not over “the threshold of Eld” (as were Judge
+Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean criticism).  His
+knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly superior to mine, for I
+speak merely, in Matthew Arnold’s words, as “a belletristic trifler.”
+
+Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge of legal
+evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not “hold a brief for Bacon” as
+the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems, and does not value
+Baconian cryptograms.  In the following chapters I make endeavours,
+conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of Mr. Greenwood.  It is a
+negative theory.  He denies that Will Shakspere (or Shaxbere, or
+Shagspur, and so on) was the author of the plays and poems.  Some other
+party was, _in the main_, with other hands, the author.  Mr. Greenwood
+cannot, or does not, offer a guess as to who this ingenious Somebody was.
+He does not affirm, and he does not deny, that Bacon had a share, greater
+or less, in the undertaking.
+
+In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every argument; to
+traverse every field.  In philology I am all unlearned, and cannot
+pretend to discuss the language of Shakespeare, any more than I can
+analyse the language of Homer into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so on.
+Again, I cannot pretend to have an opinion, based on internal evidence,
+about the genuine Shakespearean character of such plays as _Titus
+Andronicus_, _Henry VI_, Part I, and _Troilus and Cressida_.  About them
+different views are held _within_ both camps.
+
+I am no lawyer or naturalist (as Partridge said, _Non omnia possumus
+omnes_), and cannot imagine why our Author is so accurate in his frequent
+use of terms of law—if he be Will; and so totally at sea in natural
+history—if he be Francis, who “took all knowledge for his province.”
+
+How can a layman pretend to deal with Shakespeare’s legal attainments,
+after he has read the work of the learned Recorder of Bristol, Mr.
+Castle, K.C.?  To his legal mind it seems that in some of Will’s plays he
+had the aid of an expert in law, and then his technicalities were
+correct.  In other plays he had no such tutor, and then he was sadly to
+seek in his legal jargon.  I understand Mr. Greenwood to disagree on this
+point.  Mr. Castle says, “I think Shakespeare would have had no
+difficulty in getting aid from several sources.  There is therefore no
+_prima facie_ reason why we should suppose the information was supplied
+by Bacon.”
+
+Of course there is not!
+
+“In fact, there are some reasons why one should attribute the legal
+assistance, say, to Coke, rather than to Bacon.”
+
+The truth is, that Bacon seems not to have been lawyer enough for Will’s
+purposes.  “We have no reason to believe that Bacon was particularly well
+read in the technicalities of our law; he never seems to have seriously
+followed his profession.” {0a}
+
+Now we have Mr. Greenwood’s testimonial in favour of Mr. Castle, “Who
+really does know something about law.” {0b}  Mr. Castle thinks that Bacon
+really did not know enough about law, and suggests Sir Edward Coke, of
+all human beings, as conceivably Will’s “coach” on legal technicalities.
+Perhaps Will consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury on theological
+niceties?
+
+_Que sçais je_?  In some plays, says Mr. Castle, Will’s law is all right,
+in other plays it is all wrong.  As to Will’s law, when Mr. Greenwood and
+Mr. Castle differ, a layman dare not intervene.
+
+Concerning legend and tradition about our Will, it seems that, in each
+case, we should do our best to trace the _Quellen_, to discover the
+original sources, and the steps by which the tale arrived at its late
+recorders in print; and then each man’s view as to the veracity of the
+story will rest on his sense of probability; and on his bias, his wish to
+believe or to disbelieve.
+
+There exists, I believe, only one personal anecdote of Will, the actor,
+and on it the Baconians base an argument against the contemporary
+recognition of him as a dramatic author.  I take the criticism of Mr.
+Greenwood (who is not a Baconian).  One John Manningham,
+Barrister-at-Law, “a well-educated and cultured man,” notes in his Diary
+(February 2, 1601) that “at our feast we had a play called Twelve Night
+or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or Menæchmi in Plautus,
+but most like and near to that in Italian called _Inganni_.”  He confides
+to his Diary the tricks played on Malvolio as “a good practice.” {0c}
+That is all.
+
+About the authorship he says nothing: perhaps he neither knew nor cared
+who the author was.  In our day the majority of people who tell me about
+a play which they have seen, cannot tell me the name of the author.  Yet
+it is usually printed on the playbill, though in modest type.  The public
+does not care a straw about the author’s name, unless he be deservedly
+famous for writing letters to the newspapers on things in general; for
+his genius as an orator; his enthusiasm as a moralist, or in any other
+extraneous way.  Dr. Forman in his queer account of the plot of “Mack
+Beth” does not allude to the name of the author (April 20, 1610).
+_Twelfth Night_ was not published till 1623, in the Folio: there was no
+quarto to enlighten Manningham about the author’s name.  We do not hear
+of printed playbills, with author’s names inserted, at that period.  It
+seems probable that occasional playgoers knew and cared no more about
+authors than they do at present.  The world of the wits, the critics
+(such as Francis Meres), poets, playwrights, and players, did know and
+care about the authors; apparently Manningham did not.  But he heard a
+piquant anecdote of two players and (March 13, 1601) inserted it in his
+Diary.
+
+Shakespeare once anticipated Richard Burbage at an amorous tryst with a
+citizen’s wife.  Burbage had, by the way, been playing the part of
+Richard III.  While Will was engaged in illicit dalliance, the message
+was brought (what a moment for bringing messages!) that Richard III was
+at the door, and Will “caused return to be made that William the
+Conqueror was before Richard III.  _Shakespeare’s name William_.”  (My
+italics.)  Mr. Greenwood argues that if “Shakspere the player was known
+to the world as the author of the plays of Shakespeare, it does seem
+extremely remarkable” that Manningham should have thought it needful to
+add “Shakespeare’s name William.” {0d}
+
+But _was_ “Shakspere,” or any man, “known to the world as the author of
+the plays of Shakespeare”?  No! for Mr. Greenwood writes, “nobody,
+outside a very small circle, troubled his head as to who the dramatist or
+dramatists might be.” {0e}  To that “very small circle” we have no reason
+to suppose that Manningham belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that
+_Twelfth Night_ resembles the _Menæchmi_.  Consequently, it is _not_
+“extremely remarkable” that Manningham wrote “Shakespeare’s name
+William,” to explain to posterity the joke about “William the Conqueror,”
+instead of saying, “the brilliant author of the Twelfth Night play which
+so much amused me at our feast a few weeks ago.” {0f}  “Remarkable” out
+of all hooping it would have been had Manningham written in the style of
+Mr. Greenwood.  But Manningham apparently did not “trouble his head as to
+who the dramatist or dramatists might be.”  “Nobody, outside a very small
+circle,” _did_ trouble his poor head about that point.  Yet Mr. Greenwood
+thinks “it does seem extremely remarkable” that Manningham did not
+mention the author.
+
+Later, on the publication of the Folio (1623), the world seems to have
+taken more interest in literary matters.  Mr. Greenwood says that then
+while “the multitude” would take Ben Jonson’s noble panegyric on
+Shakespeare as a poet “_au pied de la lettre_,” “the enlightened few
+would recognise that it had an esoteric meaning.” {0g}  Then, it seems,
+“the world”—the “multitude”—regarded the actor as the author.  Only “the
+enlightened few” were aware that when Ben _said_ “Shakespeare,” and “Swan
+of Avon,” he _meant_—somebody else.
+
+Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by persons of
+different mental conditions.  For example, in 1635 or 1636, Cuthbert
+Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous actor, Will’s comrade, petitioned
+Lord Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, for consideration in a quarrel
+about certain theatres.  Telling the history of the houses, he mentions
+that the Burbages “to ourselves joined those deserving men, Shakspere,
+Heminge, Condell, Phillips and others.”  Cuthbert is arguing his case
+solely from the point of the original owners or lease-holders of the
+houses, and of the well-known actors to whom they joined themselves.
+Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood think that “it does indeed seem strange . . .
+that the proprietor[s] of the playhouses which had been made famous by
+the production of the Shakespearean plays, should, in 1635—twelve years
+after the publication of the great Folio—describe their reputed author to
+the survivor of the Incomparable Pair, as merely a ‘man-player’ and ‘a
+deserving man.’”  Why did he not remind the Lord Chamberlain that this
+“deserving man” was the author of all these famous dramas?  Was it
+because he was aware that the Earl of Pembroke “knew better than that”?
+{0h}
+
+These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof positive of their
+case.
+
+Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of what the
+Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated, in 1623, to him
+and his brother, by Will’s friends, Heminge and Condell, as they had been
+patrons of the late William Shakspere and admirers of his plays.  The
+terms of this dedication are to be cited in the text, later.  _We_ all
+_now_ would have reminded the Earl of what he very well knew.  Cuthbert
+did not.
+
+The intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will
+read pp. 481–484 in _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, by
+the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton.  Cuthbert was a
+puzzle-pated old boy.  The silence as to Will’s authorship on the part of
+this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635–36, cannot outweigh the explicit
+and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed by his friends
+and fellow-actors in 1623.
+
+Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for the
+affirmative to negative evidence from silence, the silence of Cuthbert
+Burbage.
+
+One may read through Mr. Greenwood’s three books and note the engaging
+varieties of his views; they vary as suits his argument; but he is
+unaware of it, or can justify his varyings.  Thus, in 1610, one John
+Davies wrote rhymes in which he speaks of “our English Terence, Mr. Will
+Shakespeare”; “good Will.”  In his period patriotic English critics
+called a comic dramatist “the English Terence,” or “the English Plautus,”
+precisely as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant “the American
+Wordsworth,” or Cooper “the American Scott”; and as Scots called the Rev.
+Mr. Thomson “the Scottish Turner.”  Somewhere, I believe, exists “the
+Belgian Shakespeare.”
+
+Following this practice, Davies had to call Will either “our English
+Terence,” or “our English Plautus.”  Aristophanes would not have been
+generally recognised; and Will was no more like one of these ancient
+authors than another.  Thus Davies was apt to choose either Plautus or
+Terence; it was even betting which he selected.  But he chanced to choose
+Terence; and this is “curious,” and suggests suspicions to Mr.
+Greenwood—and the Baconians.  They are so very full of suspicions!
+
+It does not suit the Baconians, or Mr. Greenwood, to find contemporary
+recognition of Will as an author. {0i}  Consequently, Mr. Greenwood finds
+Davies’s “curious, and at first sight, inappropriate comparison of
+‘Shake-speare’ to Terence worthy of remark, for Terence is the very
+author whose name is alleged to have been used as a mask-name, or _nom de
+plume_, for the writings of great men who wished to keep the fact of
+their authorship concealed.”
+
+Now Davies felt bound to bring in _some_ Roman parallel to Shakespeare;
+and had only the choice of Terence or Plautus.  Meres (1598) used
+Plautus; Davies used Terence.  Mr. Greenwood {0j} shows us that Plautus
+would not do.  “Could _he_” (Shakespeare) “write only of courtesans and
+_cocottes_, and not of ladies highly born, cultured, and refined? . . . ”
+
+“The supposed parallel” (Plautus and Shakespeare) “breaks down at every
+point.”  Thus, on Mr. Greenwood’s showing, Plautus could not serve
+Davies, or should not serve him, in his search for a Roman parallel to
+“good Will.”  But Mr. Greenwood also writes, “if he” (Shakespeare) “was
+to be likened to a Latin comedian, surely Plautus is the writer with whom
+he should have been compared.” {0k}  Yet Plautus was the very man who
+cannot be used as a parallel to Shakespeare.  Of course no Roman nor any
+other comic dramatist closely resembles the _author_ of _As You Like It_.
+They who selected either Plautus or Terence meant no more than that both
+were celebrated comic dramatists.  Plautus was no parallel to Will.  Yet
+“surely Plautus is the author to whom he should have been compared” by
+Davies, says Mr. Greenwood.  If Davies tried Plautus, the comparison was
+bad; if Terence, it was “curious,” as Terence was absurdly accused of
+being the “_nom de plume_” of some great “concealed poets” of Rome.
+“From all the known facts about Terence,” says a Baconian critic (who has
+consulted Smith’s _Biographical Dictionary_), “it is an almost
+unavoidable inference that John Davies made the comparison to Shakspere
+because he knew of the point common to both cases.”  The common point is
+taken to be, not that both men were famous comic dramatists, but that
+Roman literary gossips said, and that Baconians and Mr. Greenwood say,
+that “Terence” was said to be a “mask-name,” and that “Shakespeare” is a
+mask-name.  Of the second opinion there is not a hint in literature of
+the time of good Will.
+
+What surprises one most in this controversy is that men eminent in the
+legal profession should be “anti-Shakesperean,” if not overtly Baconian.
+For the evidence for the contemporary faith in Will’s authorship is all
+positive; from his own age comes not a whisper of doubt, not even a
+murmur of surprise.  It is incredible to me that his fellow-actors and
+fellow-playwrights should have been deceived, especially when they were
+such men as Ben Jonson and Tom Heywood.  One would expect lawyers, of all
+people, to have been most impatient of the surprising attempts made to
+explain away Ben Jonson’s testimony, by aid, first, of quite a false
+analogy (Scott’s denial of his own authorship of his novels), and,
+secondly, by the suppression of such a familiar fact as the constant
+inconsistency of Ben’s judgments of his contemporaries in literature.
+Mr. Greenwood must have forgotten the many examples of this
+inconsistency; but I have met a Baconian author who knew nothing of the
+fact.  Mr. Greenwood, it is proper to say, does not seem to be satisfied
+that he has solved what he calls “the Jonsonian riddle.”  Really, there
+is no riddle.  About Will, as about other authors, his contemporaries and
+even his friends, on occasion, Ben “spoke with two voices,” now in terms
+of hyperbolical praise, now in carping tones of censure.  That is the
+obvious solution of “the Jonsonian riddle.”
+
+I must apologise if I have in places spelled the name of the Swan of Avon
+“Shakespeare” where Mr. Greenwood would write “Shakspere,” and _vice
+versa_.  He uses “Shakespeare” where he means the Author; “Shakspere”
+where he means Will; and is vexed with some people who write the name of
+Will as “Shakespeare.”  As Will, in the opinion of a considerable portion
+of the human race, and of myself, _was_ the Author, one is apt to write
+his name as “Shakespeare” in the usual way.  But difficult cases occur,
+as in quotations, and in conditional sentences.  By any spelling of the
+name I always mean the undivided personality of “Him who sleeps by Avon.”
+
+
+
+
+I
+THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN POSITIONS
+
+
+TILL the years 1856–7 no voice was raised against the current belief
+about Shakespeare (1564–1616).  He was the author in the main of the
+plays usually printed as his.  In some cases other authors, one or more,
+may have had fingers in his dramas; in other cases, Shakespeare may have
+“written over” and transfigured earlier plays, of himself and of others;
+he may have contributed, more or less, to several plays mainly by other
+men.  Separately printed dramas published during his time carry his name
+on their title-pages, but are not included in the first collected edition
+of his dramas, “The First Folio,” put forth by two of his friends and
+fellow-actors, in 1623, seven years after his death.
+
+On all these matters did commentators, critics, and antiquarians for long
+dispute; but none denied that the actor, Will Shakspere (spelled as
+heaven pleased), was in the main the author of most of the plays of 1623,
+and the sole author of _Venus and Adonis_, _Lucrece_, and the Sonnets.
+
+Even now, in England at least, it would be perhaps impossible to find one
+special and professed student of Elizabethan literature, and of the
+classical and European literatures, who does not hold by the ancient
+belief, the belief of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and intimates, the
+belief that he was, in the sense explained above, the author of the
+plays.
+
+But ours is not a generation to be overawed by “Authority” (as it is
+called).  A small but eager company of scholars have convinced themselves
+that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays.  That is the point of
+agreement among these enthusiasts: points of difference are numerous:
+some very wild little sects exist.  Meanwhile multitudes of earnest and
+intelligent men and women, having read notices in newspapers of the
+Baconian books, or heard of them at lectures and tea-parties, disbelieve
+in the authorship of “the Stratford rustic,” and look down on the
+faithful of Will Shakespere with extreme contempt.
+
+From the Baconians we receive a plain straightforward theory, “Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare,” as one of their own prophets has said. {4a}  Since we
+have plenty of evidence for Bacon’s life and occupations during the
+period of Shakespearean poetic activity, we can compare what he was doing
+as a man, a student, a Crown lawyer, a pleader in the Courts, a political
+pamphleteer, essayist, courtier, active member of Parliament, and so on,
+with what he is said to have been doing—by the Baconians; namely, writing
+two dramas yearly.
+
+But there is another “Anti-Willian” theory, which would dethrone Will
+Shakspere, and put but a Shadow in his place.  Conceive a “concealed
+poet,” of high social position, contemporary with Bacon and Shakespeare.
+Let him be so fond of the Law that he cannot keep legal “shop” out of his
+love Sonnets even.  Make him a courtier; a statesman; a philosopher; a
+scholar who does not blench even from the difficult Latin of Ovid and
+Plautus.  Let this almost omniscient being possess supreme poetic genius,
+extensive classical attainments, and a tendency to make false quantities.
+Then conceive him to live through the reigns of “Eliza and our James,”
+without leaving in history, in science, in society, in law, in politics
+or scholarship, a single trace of his existence.  He left nothing but the
+poems and plays usually attributed to Will.  As to the date of his
+decease, we only know that it must necessarily have been later than the
+composition of the last genuine Shakespearean play—for this paragon wrote
+it.
+
+Such is the Being who occupies, in the theory of the non-Baconian, _but
+not Anti-Baconian_, Anti-Willians, the intellectual throne filled, in the
+Will Shakespeare theory, by Will; and in the Baconian, by Bacon—two kings
+of Brentford on one throne.
+
+We are to be much engaged by the form of this theory which is held by Mr.
+G. G. Greenwood in his _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_.  In attempting
+to explain what he means I feel that I am skating on very thin ice.
+Already, in two volumes (_In Re Shakespeare_, 1909, and _The Vindicators
+of Shakespeare_), Mr. Greenwood has accused his critics of frequently
+misconceiving and misrepresenting his ideas: wherefore I also tremble.  I
+am perfectly confident in saying that he “holds no brief for the
+Baconians.”  He is _not_ a Baconian.  His position is negative merely:
+Will of Stratford is _not_ the author of the Shakespearean plays and
+poems.  Then who is?  Mr. Greenwood believes that work by an unknown
+number of hands exists in the plays first published all together in 1623.
+Here few will differ from him.  But, setting aside this aspect of the
+case, Mr. Greenwood appears to me to believe in an entity named
+“Shakespeare,” or “the Author,” who is the predominating partner; though
+Mr. Greenwood does not credit him with all the plays in the Folio of 1623
+(nor, perhaps, with the absolute entirety of any given play).  “The
+Author” or “Shakespeare” is not a syndicate (like the Homer of many
+critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the male sex.  As
+to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is “agnostic.”
+He himself is not Anti-Baconian.  He does not oust Bacon and put the
+Unknown in his place.  He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may have
+contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work.  To put it
+briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field against the favourite (our Will),
+and Bacon _may_ be in the field.  If he has any part in the whole I
+suspect that it is “the lion’s part,” but Mr. Greenwood does not commit
+himself to anything positive.  We shall find (if I am not mistaken) that
+Mr. Greenwood regards the hypothesis of the Baconians as “an extremely
+reasonable one,” {7a} and that for his purposes it would be an extremely
+serviceable one, if not even essential.  For as Bacon was a genius to
+whose potentialities one can set no limit, he is something to stand by,
+whereas we cannot easily believe—I cannot believe—that the actual
+“Author,” the “Shakespeare” lived and died and left no trace of his
+existence except his share in the works called Shakespearean.
+
+However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this
+advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we
+cannot, as in Bacon’s case, show how he was occupied while the plays were
+being composed.  He _must_, however, have been much at Court, we learn,
+and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology.  Was he Sir Edward Coke?
+Was he James VI and I?
+
+It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the
+“Anti-Willians” in a shape which will satisfy them.  The task, especially
+when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible.  I can
+only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to
+understand them.  I conceive the Baconians to cry that “the world
+possesses a mass of transcendent literature, attributed to a man named
+William _Shakespeare_.”  Of a man named William _Shakspere_ (there are
+many varieties of spelling) we certainly know that he was born (1564) and
+bred in Stratford-on-Avon, a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant
+country town.  There is absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford
+boy of his standing) ever went to Stratford school.  His father, his
+mother, and his daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their
+marks; and if he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly
+bad hand.  As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his
+death inform us, he was a butcher’s apprentice; and also a schoolmaster
+“who knew Latin pretty well”; and a poacher.  He made, before he was
+nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls “ante-nup.”  He
+early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his wife.  He
+came to London, we do not know when (about 1582, according to the “guess”
+of an antiquary of 1680); held horses at the door of a theatre (so
+tradition says), was promoted to the rank of “servitor” (whatever that
+may mean), became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594 played
+before Queen Elizabeth.  He put money in his pocket (heaven knows how),
+for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in his native
+_bourgade_.  He obtained, by nefarious genealogical falsehoods (too
+common, alas, in heraldry), the right to bear arms; and went on acting.
+In 1610–11 (?) he retired to his native place.  He never took any
+interest in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he never
+troubled himself about his valuable copyrights; never dreamed of making a
+collected edition of his works.  He died in 1616, probably of drink
+taken.  Legal documents prove him to have been a lender of small sums, an
+avid creditor, a would-be encloser of commons.  In his will he does not
+bequeath or mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.  It
+is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and plays, so
+rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed
+to “William Shakespeare.”  These must be the works of “a concealed poet,”
+a philosopher, a courtier moving in the highest circles, a supreme
+legist, and, necessarily, a great poet, and student of the classics.
+
+No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a
+scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other
+qualifications so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon—or
+some person unknown, who was in all respects equally distinguished, but
+kept his light under a bushel.  Consequently the name “William
+Shakespeare” is a pseudonym or “pen-name” wisely adopted by Bacon (or the
+other man) as early as 1593, at a time when William Shakspere was
+notoriously an actor in the company which produced the plays of the
+genius styling himself “William Shakespeare.”
+
+Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of
+expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now
+summarised the views of the Baconians _sans phrase_, and of the more
+cautious or more credulous “Anti-Willians,” as I may style the party who
+deny to Will the actor any share in the authorship of the plays, but do
+not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.
+
+Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the
+controversy is _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, by Mr. G. G. Greenwood
+(see my Introduction).  To this volume I turn for the exposition of the
+theory that “Will Shakspere” (with many other spellings) is an actor from
+the country—a man of very scanty education, in all probability, and
+wholly destitute of books; while “William Shakespeare,” or with the
+hyphen, “Shake-speare,” is a “_nom de plume_” adopted by the Great
+Unknown “concealed poet.”
+
+When I use the word “author” here, I understand Mr. Greenwood to mean
+that in the plays called “Shakespearean” there exists work from many
+pens: owing to the curious literary manners, methods, and ethics of
+dramatic writing in, say, 1589–1611.  In my own poor opinion this is
+certainly true of several plays in the first collected edition, “The
+Folio,” produced seven years after Will’s death, namely in 1623.  These
+curious “collective” methods of play-writing are to be considered later.
+
+Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that
+“William Shake-speare” (with or without the hyphen), on the title-pages
+of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems, is the chosen
+pen-name, or “_nom de plume_,” of Bacon or of the Unknown.
+
+Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written {11a}
+on the name of the actor, and the “_nom de plume_” of the unknown author
+who, by the theory, was not the actor.  Let me first confess my firm
+belief that there is no cause for all the copious writing about the
+spellings “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”—as indicating the true but
+“concealed poet”—and “Shakspere” (&c.), as indicating the Warwickshire
+rustic.  At Stratford and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in
+scores of ways, was spelled in different ways within a single document.
+If the actor himself uniformly wrote “Shakspere” (it seems that we have
+but five signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled
+variously in documents concerning him and his affairs.  In London the
+printers aimed at a kind of uniformity, “Shakespeare” or “Shake-speare”:
+and even if he wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.
+Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of spelling—and there is
+no more in the matter.
+
+I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations are
+indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood’s researches.
+“The family of William Shakspere of Stratford” (perhaps it were safer to
+say “the members of his name”) “wrote their name in many different
+ways—some sixty, I believe, have been noted . . . but the form
+‘Shakespeare’ seems never to have been employed by them”; and, according
+to Mr. Spedding, “Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name ‘in any
+known case.’”  (According to many Baconians he never wrote his name in
+his life.)  On the other hand, the dedications of _Venus and Adonis_
+(1593) and of _Lucrece_ (1594) are inscribed “William Shakespeare”
+(without the hyphen).  In 1598, the title-page of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_
+“bore the name W. Shakespere,” while in the same year _Richard II_ and
+_Richard III_ bear “William Shake-speare,” with the hyphen (not without
+it, as in the two dedications by the Author).  “The name which appears in
+the body of the conveyance and of the mortgage bearing” (the actor’s)
+“signature is ‘Shakespeare,’ while ‘Shackspeare’ appears in the will,
+prepared, as we must presume, by or under the directions of Francis
+Collyns, the Stratford solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto”
+(and received a legacy of £13, 6_s._ 8_d._).
+
+  [Picture: Copy of the title-page of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” 1598.  The
+earliest title-page in which Shakespeare’s name is given as the author of
+    the work.  From J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps’ Outlines of the Life of
+                               Shakespeare]
+
+Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it is
+spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages—and also
+is spelled otherwise, as “Shackspeare.”  In March 1594 the actor’s name
+is spelled “Shakespeare” in Treasury accounts.  The legal and the
+literary and Treasury spellings (and conveyances and mortgages and wills
+are _not_ literature) are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare,
+Shakespere—all four are used, but we must regard the actor as never
+signing “Shakespeare” in any of these varieties of spelling—if sign he
+ever did; at all events he is not known to have used the _a_ in the last
+syllable.
+
+I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood’s words {13a} concerning the _nom
+de plume_ of the “concealed poet,” whoever he was.
+
+“And now a word upon the name ‘Shakespeare.’  That in this form, and more
+especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare, the word makes an excellent _nom
+de plume_ is obvious.  As old Thomas Fuller remarks, the name suggests
+_Martial_ in its warlike sound, ‘Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare.’  It is
+of course further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom,
+for Pallas also was a spear-shaker (Pallas ὰπὸ του πάλλειν τὸ δόρυ); and
+all will remember Ben Jonson’s verses . . . ” on Shakespeare’s
+“true-filed lines”—
+
+    “In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
+    As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.”
+
+There is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can easily
+be made), and about “Jonson’s Cri-spinus or Cri-spinas,” but perhaps we
+have now the gist of Mr. Greenwood’s remarks on the “excellent _nom de
+plume_” (_cf._ pp. 31–37.  On the whole of this, _cf. The Shakespeare
+Problem Restated_, pp. 293–295; a _nom de plume_ called a “pseudonym,”
+pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare “a mask name,” p. 328; a “pseudonym,” p. 330;
+“_nom de plume_,” p. 335).
+
+Now why was the “_nom de plume_” or “pseudonym” “William Shakespeare” “an
+excellent _nom de plume_” for a concealed author, courtier, lawyer,
+scholar, and so forth?  If “Shakespeare” suggested Pallas Athene, goddess
+of wisdom and of many other things, and so was appropriate, why add
+“William”?
+
+In 1593, when the “pseudonym” first appears in _Venus and Adonis_, a
+country actor whose name, in legal documents—presumably drawn up by or
+for his friend, Francis Collyns at Stratford—is written “William
+Shakespeare,” was before the town as an actor in the leading company,
+that of the Lord Chamberlain.  This company produced the plays some of
+which, by 1598, bear “W. Shakespere,” or “William Shakespeare” on their
+title-pages.  Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his name
+“Shakspere,” “William Shakespeare” was, practically (on the Baconian
+theory), not only a pseudonym of one man, a poet, but also the real name
+of another man, a well-known actor, who was _not_ the “concealed poet.”
+
+“William Shakespeare” or “Shakespere” was thus, in my view, the ideally
+worst pseudonym which a poet who wished to be “concealed” could possibly
+have had the fatuity to select.  His plays and poems would be, as they
+were, universally attributed to the actor, who is represented as a person
+conspicuously incapable of writing them.  With Mr. Greenwood’s arguments
+against the certainty of this attribution I deal later.
+
+Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide
+reading, the choice of name might have been judicious.  A “concealed
+poet” of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting the
+plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies
+from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, through that
+knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will Shakspere.
+He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as it was his whim
+to do.  The actor might make fair copies in his own hand, give them to
+his company, and say that the improved works were from his own pen and
+genius.  The lie might pass, but only if the actor, in his life and witty
+talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended to have done.  But
+if the actor, according to some Baconians, could not write even his own
+name, he was impossible as a mask for the poet.  He was also impossible,
+I think, if he were what Mr. Greenwood describes him to be.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to London,
+does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name.  But, if he
+were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is no documentary
+record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps “he was removed from school
+long before the usual age,” “in all probability” when “he was about
+thirteen” (an age at which some boys, later well known, went up to their
+universities).  If we send him to school at seven or so, “it appears that
+he could only have enjoyed such advantages as it may be supposed to have
+provided for a period of five or six years at the outside.  He was then
+withdrawn, and, as it seems, put to calf-slaughtering.” {16a}
+
+What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will “could have
+learned but little there.  No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar schools,
+if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin driven into them.
+Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was taught; and an industrious
+boy who had gone through the course and attained to the higher classes
+would generally be able to write fair Latin prose.  But he would learn
+very little else” (except to write fair Latin prose?).  “What we now call
+‘culture’ certainly did not enter into the ‘curriculum,’ nor ‘English,’
+nor modern languages, nor ‘literature.’” {17a}  Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
+says that “removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate
+relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of
+occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe
+that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of
+polished accomplishments.” {17b}  Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship
+to a butcher or draper, but doubts the poaching, and the frequent
+whippings and imprisonments, as in the story told by the Rev. R. Davies
+in 1708. {17c}
+
+That this promising young man, “when he came to London, spoke the
+Warwickshire dialect or _patois_ is, then, as certain as anything can be
+that is incapable of mathematical proof.” {17d}  “Here is the young
+Warwickshire provincial . . . ” {17e} producing, apparently five or six
+years after his arrival in town, _Venus and Adonis_ . . . “Is it
+conceivable that this was the work of the Stratford Player of whom we
+know so little, but of whom we know so much too much?  If so we have here
+a veritable sixteenth-century miracle.” {17f}  Moreover, “our great
+supposed poet and dramatist had at his death neither book nor manuscript
+in his possession, or to which he was legally entitled, or in which he
+had any interest whatever.” {17g}
+
+If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a _patois_ could
+write _Venus and Adonis_, manifestly it was inconceivable in 1593, when
+_Venus and Adonis_ was signed “William Shakespeare.”  No man who knew the
+actor (as described) could believe that he was the author, but there does
+not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the faintest doubt was
+thrown on the actor’s authorship; ignorant as he was, bookless, and rude
+of speech.  For such a Will as Mr. Greenwood describes to persuade the
+literary and dramatic world of his age that he _did_ write the plays,
+would have been a miracle.  Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to
+persuade us that there is no sufficient evidence that Will _did_
+persuade, say Ben Jonson, of his authorship and we shall see whether or
+not he works this twentieth-century miracle of persuasion.
+
+Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic
+Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass for
+the Author. {18a}  But his own bookless actor with a _patois_ seems to
+him, as author of _Venus and Adonis_, almost inconceivable.  Yet, despite
+Will’s bookless rusticity, this poem with _Lucrece_, which displays
+knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English by 1593, was
+regarded as his own.  I must suppose, therefore, that Will was _not_
+manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood thinks.  “I think it
+highly probable,” says this critic, “that he attended the Grammar School
+at Stratford” (where nothing but Latin was taught) “for four or five
+years, and that, later in life, after some years in London, he was
+probably able to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ‘Poet-Ape
+that would be thought our chief.’  Nay, I am not at all sure that he
+would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George
+Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better.
+But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of _Venus
+and Adonis_ or of _Hamlet_.” {19a}
+
+Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood’s
+private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins,
+but could not write _Venus and Adonis_.  Will, therefore, though
+bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature, in
+partnership with Wilkins.  We have merely the critic’s opinion that Will
+could not write _Hamlet_, even if, like Wordsworth, “he had the mind,”
+even if the gods had made him more poetical than Wilkins.
+
+Again, “he had had but little schooling; he had ‘small Latin and less
+Greek’” (as Ben Jonson truly says), “but he was a good _Johannes
+Factotum_; he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, ‘bumbast out a
+blank verse.’” {19b}
+
+The “_Johannes Factotum_,” who could “bumbast out a blank verse,” is
+taken from Robert Greene’s hackneyed attack on an actor-poet,
+“Shake-scene,” published in 1592.  “Poet-Ape that would be thought our
+chief,” is from an epigram on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601–16?).  If
+the allusions by Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592, had a
+literary ambition so towering that he thought his own work in the new art
+of dramatic blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not to speak of
+Wilkins), and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to three of his
+playwright friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.
+
+If Jonson’s “Poet-Ape” be meant for Will, by 1601 Will would fain “be
+thought the chief” of contemporary dramatists.  His vanity soared far
+above George Wilkins!  Greene’s phrases and Jonson’s are dictated by
+spite, jealousy, and envy; and from them a true view of the work of the
+man whom they envy, the actor-poet, cannot be obtained.  We might as well
+judge Molière in the spirit of the author of _Elomire Hypocondre_, and of
+de Visé!  The Anti-Willian arguments keep on appearing, going behind the
+scenes, and reappearing, like a stage army.  To avoid this phenomenon I
+reserve what is to be said about “Shake-scene” and “Poet-Ape” for another
+place (pp. 138–145 _infra_).  But I must give the reader a warning.
+Concerning “William Shakespeare” as a “_nom de plume_,” or pseudonym, Mr.
+Greenwood says, “Some, indeed, would see through it, and roundly accuse
+the player of putting forth the works of others as his own.  To such he
+would be a ‘Poet-Ape,’ or ‘an upstart crow’ (Shake-scene) ‘beautified
+with the feathers of other writers.’” {21a}
+
+If this be true, if “some would see through” (Mr. Greenwood, apparently,
+means _did_ “see through”) the “_nom de plume_,” the case of the
+Anti-Willians is promising.  But, in this matter, Mr. Greenwood _se
+trompe_.  Neither Greene nor Jonson accused “Shake-scene” or “Poet-Ape”
+of “putting forth the works of others as his own.”  That is quite
+certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene have reached us.  (See
+pp. 141–145 _infra_.)
+
+If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were credited with
+the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in “the profession,” and
+among rival playwrights who envied the wealth and “glory” of the actors.
+This curiosity, prompting the wits and players to watch and “shadow”
+Will, would, to put it mildly, most seriously imperil the secret of the
+concealed author who had the folly to sign himself “William Shakespeare.”
+Human nature could not rest under such a provocation as the “concealed
+poet” offered.
+
+This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the Unknown to
+be the concealed author, one must have credited his mask, Will, with
+abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for learning—with about as much as he
+probably possessed.  But the Baconians make him an illiterate yokel, and
+we have quoted Mr. Greenwood’s estimate of the young Warwickshire
+provincial.
+
+We all have our personal equations in the way of belief.  That the plot
+of the “_nom de plume_” should have evaded discovery for a week, if the
+actor were the untutored countryman of the hypotheses, is to me, for one,
+absolutely incredible.  A “concealed poet” looking about for a “_nom de
+plume_” and a mask behind which he could be hidden, would not have
+selected the name, or the nearest possible approach to the name, of an
+ignorant unread actor.  As he was never suspected of not being the author
+of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus,
+manifestly incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the plays
+exhibit.  Every one must judge for himself.  Mr. Greenwood fervently
+believes in what I disbelieve. {22a}
+
+“Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves at
+all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays . . . ”
+says Mr. Greenwood.
+
+Very few care now.  They know the actors’ names: in vain, as a rule, do I
+ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.  But in
+Elizabeth’s time the few who cared were apt to care very much, and they
+would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a bookless, untaught
+man, was announced as the author of plays which were among the most
+popular of their day.  The seekers never found any other author.  They
+left no hint that they suspected the existence of any other author.
+Hence I venture to infer that Will seemed to them no unread rustic, but a
+fellow of infinite fancy,—no scholar to be sure, but very capable of
+writing the pieces which he fathered.
+
+They may all have been mistaken.  Nobody can prove that Heywood and Ben
+Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken.  But certain it
+is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable of the works which
+were attributed to him.  Therefore he cannot possibly have been the man
+who could not write, of the more impulsive Baconians; or the bookless,
+and probably all but Latinless, man of Mr. Greenwood’s theory.  The
+positions already seem to me to be untenable.
+
+
+
+
+II
+THE “SILENCE” ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+BEFORE proceeding further to examine Mr. Greenwood’s book, and the
+Baconian theories, with the careful attention which they deserve, we must
+clear the ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle
+Baconians, though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the
+problems.
+
+The first question is: Why, considering that Shakespeare, by the consent
+of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations, was one of the
+world’s very greatest poets, have we received so few and such brief
+notices of him from the pens of his contemporaries?
+
+“It is wonderful,” exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor, “that hundreds of
+persons should not have left records of him. {27a}  We know nearly as
+much about the most insignificant writer of the period as we know of him,
+but fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.  It is senseless
+to try to account for this otherwise than by recognising that the man was
+not the author.”
+
+Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent.  He sees the sixteenth century in
+the colours of the twentieth.  We know nothing, except a few dates of
+birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court, and so
+forth, concerning several of Shakespeare’s illustrious contemporaries and
+successors in the art of dramatic poetry.  The Baconians do not quite
+understand, or, at least, keep steadily before their minds, one immense
+difference between the Elizabethan age and later times.  In 1590–1630,
+there was no public excitement about the characters, personalities, and
+anecdotage of merely literary men, poets, and playwrights, who held no
+position in public affairs, as Spenser did; or in Court, Society, and
+War, as Sidney did; who did not write about their own feuds and
+friendships, like Greene and Nash; who did not expand into prefaces and
+reminiscences, and satires, like Ben Jonson; who never killed anybody, as
+Ben did; nor were killed, like Marlowe; nor were involved, like him, in
+charges of atheism, and so forth; nor imprisoned with every chance of
+having their ears and noses slit, like Marston.  Consequently, silence
+and night obscure the lives and personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont,
+Fletcher, Dekker, Webster, and several others, as night and silence hide
+Shakespeare from our view.
+
+He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated separately
+in cheap and very perishable quartos.  No collected edition of his plays
+appeared during his life; without that he could not be studied, and
+recognised in his greatness.  He withdrew to the country and died.  There
+was no enthusiastic curiosity about him; nobody Boswellised any
+playwright of his time.  The Folio of 1623 gave the first opportunity of
+studying him as alone he can be studied.  The Civil Wars and the Reign of
+the Saints distracted men’s minds and depressed or destroyed the Stage.
+
+Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the actor
+at his father’s inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and cherished the
+embers of the drama, which were fading before the theatres were closed.
+Davenant collected what he could in the way of information from old
+people of the stage; he told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation; a
+few reached the late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680–90 at
+earliest.  The memories of ancient people of the theatre and clerks and
+sextons at Stratford were ransacked, to very little purpose.
+
+As these things were so, how can we expect biographical materials about
+Shakespeare?  As to the man, as to how his character impressed
+contemporaries, we have but the current epithets: “friendly,” “gentle,”
+and “sweet,” the praise of his worth by two of the actors in his company
+(published in 1623), and the brief prose note of Ben Jonson,—this is more
+than we have for the then so widely admired Beaumont, Ben Jonson’s
+friend, or Chapman, or the adored Fletcher.  “Into the dark go one and
+all,” Shakespeare and the others.  To be puzzled by and found theories on
+the silence about Shakespeare is to show an innocence very odd in learned
+disputants.
+
+The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own
+misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of Shakespeare’s
+time.  That world could not possibly appreciate his works as we do; the
+world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his plays in cheap
+pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled and in places
+unintelligible.  And in not a single instance were anecdotes and
+biographical traits of playwrights recorded, except when the men
+published matter about themselves, or when they became notorious in some
+way unconnected with their literary works.  Drummond, in Scotland, made
+brief notes of Ben Jonson’s talk; Shakespeare he never met.
+
+That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of literary
+merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in no other way
+notorious or eminent.  Mr. Greenwood justly says “the contemporary
+eulogies of the poet afford proof that there were some cultured critics
+of that day of sufficient taste and acumen to recognise, or partly
+recognise, his excellence . . . ” {30a}  (Here I omit some words,
+presently to be restored to the text.)  From such critics the poet
+received such applause as has reached us. We also know that the plays
+were popular; but the audiences have not rushed to pen and ink to record
+their satisfaction.  With them, as with all audiences, the actors and the
+_spectacle_, much more than the “cackle,” were the attractions.  When Dr.
+Ingleby says that “the bard of our admiration was unknown to the men of
+that age,” he uses hyperbole, and means, I presume, that he was unknown,
+as all authors are, to the great majority; and that those who knew him in
+part made no modern fuss about him. {31a}
+
+The second puzzle is,—Why did Shakespeare, conscious of his great powers,
+never secure for his collected plays the permanence of print and
+publication?  We cannot be sure that he and his company, in fact, did not
+provide publishers with the copy for the better Quartos or pamphlets of
+separate plays, as Mr. Pollard argues on good grounds that they sometimes
+did. {31b}  For the rest, no dramatic author edited a complete edition of
+his works before Ben Jonson, a scholarly man, set the example in the year
+of Shakespeare’s, and of Beaumont’s death (1616).  Neither Beaumont nor
+Fletcher collected and published their works for the Stage.  The idea was
+unheard of before Jonson set the example, and much of his work lay
+unprinted till years after his death. We must remember the conditions of
+play-writing in Shakespeare’s time.
+
+There were then many poets of no mean merit, all capable of admirable
+verse on occasion; and in various degrees possessed of the lofty,
+vigorous, and vivid style of that great age.  The theatre, and writing
+for the theatre, afforded to many men of talent a means of livelihood
+analogous to that offered by journalism among ourselves.  They were apt
+to work collectively, several hands hurrying out a single play; and in
+twos or threes, or fours or fives, they often collaborated.
+
+As a general rule a play when finished was sold by the author or authors
+to a company of players, or to a speculator like the notorious Philip
+Henslowe, and the new owners, “the grand possessors,” were usually averse
+to the publication of the work, lest other companies might act it.  The
+plays were primarily written to be acted.  The company in possession
+could have the play altered as they pleased by a literary man in their
+employment.
+
+To follow Mr. Greenwood’s summary of the situation “it would seem that an
+author could restrain any person from publishing his manuscript, or could
+bring an action against him for so doing, so long as he had not disposed
+of his right to it; and that the publisher could prevent any other
+publisher from issuing the work.  At the same time it is clear that the
+law was frequently violated . . . whether because of the difficulty of
+enforcing it, or through the supineness of authors; and that in
+consequence authors were frequently defrauded by surreptitious copies of
+their works being issued by piratical publishers.” {33a}
+
+It may appear that to “authors” we should, in the case of plays, add
+“owners,” such as theatrical companies, for no case is cited in which
+such a company brings an action against the publisher of a play which
+they own.  The two players of Shakespeare’s company who sign the preface
+to the first edition of his collected plays (1623, “The First Folio”)
+complain that “divers stolen and surreptitious copies” of single plays
+have been put forth, “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of
+injurious impostors.”  They speak as if they were unable to prevent, or
+had not the energy to prevent, these frauds.  In the accounts of the
+aforesaid Henslowe, we find him paying forty shillings to a printer to
+stop or “stay” the printing of a play, _Patient Grizel_, by three of his
+hacks.
+
+We perhaps come across an effort of the company to prevent or delay the
+publication of _The Merchant of Venice_, on July 17, 1598, in the
+_Stationers’ Register_.  James Robertes, and all other printers, are
+forbidden to print the book without previous permission from the Lord
+Chamberlain, the protector of Will Shakespeare’s company.  Two years
+passed before Robertes issued the book. {34a}  As is well known, Heywood,
+a most prolific playwright, boasts that he never made a double sale of
+his pieces to the players and the press.  Others occasionally did, which
+Heywood clearly thought less than honest.
+
+As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his company,
+Will’s interests were the same as theirs.  It is therefore curious that
+some of his pieces were early printed, in quartos, from very good copies;
+while others appeared in very bad copies, clearly surreptitious.
+Probably the company gave a good MS. copy, sometimes, to a printer who
+offered satisfactory terms, after the gloss of novelty was off the acted
+play. {34b}  In any case, we see that the custom and interests of the
+owners of manuscript plays ran contrary to their early publication.  In
+1619 even Ben Jonson, who loved publication, told Drummond that half of
+his comedies were still unprinted.
+
+These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by ours.  Whoever
+wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon; whoever
+legally owned the manuscripts, was equally incurious and negligent about
+the preservation of a correct text.  As we shall see later, while
+Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself edited, or gave to
+Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first collected edition (1623), the
+work has been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless manner,
+and, as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly states, the edition, in his opinion,
+contains at least two plays not by his “Shakespeare”—that “concealed
+poet”—and masses of “non-Shakespearean” work.
+
+How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either revised the
+plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an Editor as Ben
+Jonson, I cannot imagine.  This is also one of the difficulties in Mr.
+Greenwood’s theory.  Thus we cannot argue, “if the actor were the author,
+he must have been conscious of his great powers.  Therefore the actor
+cannot have been the author, for the actor wholly neglected to collect
+his printed and to print his manuscript works.”
+
+This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the plays by
+Bacon.  He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished till 1623.  “But he
+could not avow his authorship,” cry Baconians, giving various exquisite
+reasons.  Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he might not care to divulge
+his long association with “a cry of players,” and a man like Will of
+Stratford.  But he had no occasion to avow it.  He had merely to suggest
+to the players, through any safe channel, that they should collect and
+publish the works of their old friend Will Shakspere.
+
+Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he were actor
+or statesman; and the actor, at least, is not to blame for the chaos of
+the first collected edition, made while he was in his grave, and while
+Bacon was busy in revising and superintending Latin translations of his
+works on scientific subjects.
+
+We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of Shakspere
+the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was extreme, whether or
+not he were the author.  The neglect was characteristic of the
+playwrights of his own and the next generation.  In those days it was no
+marvel; few cared.  Nine years passed before a second edition of the
+collected plays appeared: thirty-two years went by before a third edition
+was issued—years of war and tumult, yet they saw the posthumous
+publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.
+
+There remains one more mystery connected with publication.  When the
+first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain
+“All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.”  According to the postulate
+of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by Jonson acting for
+him.  It contains several plays which, according to many critics, are not
+the author’s.  This, if true, is mysterious, and so is the fact that a
+few plays were published, as by Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the
+actor and of Bacon; plays which neither acknowledged for his own, for we
+hear of no remonstrance from—whoever “William Shakespeare” was.  It is
+impossible for me to say why there was no remonstrance.
+
+Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon’s plays, under his own name, with
+a slight difference in spelling, to his company.  It was as much his
+interest, in that case, to protest when Bacon’s pen-name was taken in
+vain, as if he had spelled his own surname with an _a_ in the second
+syllable.
+
+There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice. {37a}  In
+1599 Jaggard published “_The Passionate Pilgrim_; W. Shakespeare.”  Out
+of twenty poems, five only were by W. S.  In 1612, Jaggard added two
+poems by Tom Heywood, retaining W. Shakespeare’s name as sole author.
+“Heywood protested” in print, “and stated that _Shakespeare_ was
+offended, and,” says Mr. Greenwood, “very probably he was so; but as he
+was, so I conceive, ‘a concealed poet,’ writing under a _nom de plume_,
+he seems to have only made known his annoyance through the medium of
+Heywood.”
+
+If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was.  Turning to pp. 348, 349,
+we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story, with this addition, that
+the author of the poems published by Jaggard, “to do himself right, hath
+since published them in his own name.”  That is, W. Shakespeare has since
+published under his own name such pieces of _The Passionate Pilgrim_ as
+are his own.  “The author, I know,” adds Heywood, “was much offended with
+Mr. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold
+with his name.”
+
+Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published W. S.’s
+poems with others _not_ by W. S.?
+
+How can anyone explain, by any theory?  It was as open to him in 1599 as
+in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own name, or pen-name.
+
+“Here we observe,” says Mr. Greenwood, {38a} “that Heywood does nothing
+to identify ‘the author with the player.’”  This is, we shall see, the
+eternal argument.  Why should Heywood, speaking of W. Shakespeare,
+explain what all the world knew?  There was no other W. Shakespeare (with
+or without the _e_ and _a_) but one, the actor, in the world of letters
+of Elizabeth and James.  Who the author was Heywood himself has told us,
+elsewhere: the author was—Will!
+
+But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name, or, when
+he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or anyone to explain.  We
+do not know the nature of the circumstances in detail; we do not know
+that the poet saw hopes of stopping the sale of the works falsely
+attributed to him.  I do not even feel certain that he had not a finger
+in some of them.  Knowing so little, a more soaring wit than mine might
+fly to the explanation that “Shakespeare” was the “_nom de plume_” of
+Bacon or his unknown equivalent, and that he preferred to “let sleeping
+dogs lie,” or, as Mr. Greenwood might quote the Latin tag, said _ne
+moveas Camarinam_.
+
+
+
+
+III
+THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE—THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+THE banner-cry of the Baconians is the word “Impossible!”  It is
+impossible that the actor from Stratford (as they think of him, a
+bookless, untutored lad, speaking in _patois_) should have possessed the
+wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by the author of the plays
+and poems.  It is impossible that at the little Free School of Stratford
+(if he attended it), he should have gained his wide knowledge of the
+literatures of Greece and Rome.  To these arguments, the orthodox
+Stratfordian is apt to reply, that he finds in the plays and poems plenty
+of inaccurate general information on classical subjects, information in
+which the whole literature of England then abounded.  He also finds in
+the plays some knowledge of certain Latin authors, which cannot be proved
+to have been translated at the date when Shakespeare drew on them.  How
+much Latin Shakespeare knew, in our opinion, will presently be explained.
+
+But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must say that
+while the author of the plays had some lore which scholars also
+possessed, he did not use his knowledge like a scholar.  We do not see
+how a scholar could make, as the scansion of his blank verse proves that
+the author did make, the second syllable of the name of Posthumus, in
+_Cymbeline_, _long_.  He must have read a famous line in Horace thus,
+
+    “_Eheu fugaces Posthoome_, _Posthoome_!”
+
+which could scarce ’scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School.  In
+the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus short,
+equally impossible.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him _Titus Andronicus_, but also
+appears to credit it to him, as one of the older plays which he “revised,
+improved, and dressed,” {44a} and _that_ is taken to have been all his
+“authorship” in several cases.  A scholar would have corrected, not
+accepted, false quantities.  In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans
+cite Plato and Aristotle in _Troilus and Cressida_, while Plato and
+Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest conceivable
+date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose that a scholar would
+have permitted to himself the freak, any more than that in _The Winter’s
+Tale_ he should have borrowed from an earlier novel the absurdity of
+calling Delphi “Delphos” (a non-existent word), of confusing “Delphos”
+with Delos, and placing the Delphian Oracle in an island.  In the same
+play the author, quite needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano
+(1492–1546) contemporary with the flourishing age of the oracle of the
+Pythian Apollo.  This, at least, would not be ignorance.
+
+We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben’s inability to refrain from
+gibes at Shakspere’s want of scholarship.  Rowe, who had traditions of
+Davenant’s, tells how, in conversation with Suckling, Davenant, Endymion
+Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on Will’s want of learning; and how
+Hales snubbed him.  Indeed, Ben could have made mirth enough out of _The
+Winter’s Tale_.  For, granting to Mr. Greenwood {45a} that “the mention
+of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of a much earlier date, and under the
+reign of Ottocar (1255–78) Bohemia extended from the Adriatic to the
+shores of the Baltic,” that only makes matters far worse.  “Delphos”
+never was a place-name; there was no oracle on the isle of “Delphos”;
+there were no Oracles in 1255–78 (A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat
+for her portrait to Giulio Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at
+_Delphos_, but not with Ottocar.
+
+There never was so mad a mixture, not even in _Ivanhoe_; not even in
+_Kenilworth_.  Scott erred deliberately, as he says in his prefaces; but
+Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene, inserted Giulio
+Romano “for his personal diversion,” never heard of Ottocar (no more than
+I), and made a delightful congeries of errors in gaiety of heart.  Nobody
+shall convince me that Francis Bacon was so charmingly irresponsible; but
+I cannot speak so confidently of Mr. Greenwood’s Great Unknown, a severe
+scholar, but perhaps a frisky soul.  There was no region called Bohemia
+when the Delphic oracle was in vigour;—this apology (apparently contrived
+by Sir Edward Sullivan) is the most comic of erudite reflections.
+
+Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita, concerning
+the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was carried off by Dis.
+How could she, brought up in the hut of a Bohemian shepherd, know
+anything of the Rape of Proserpine?  Why not, as she lived in the days of
+the Delphic Oracle—and Giulio Romano, and of printed ballads.
+
+It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer, brought up
+among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire, should have created
+the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and known the style of his
+Armado; and understood how dukes and kings talk among themselves—usually
+in blank verse, it appears.
+
+It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard of the
+“obscure” (_sic_!) Court of Navarre; and known that at Venice there was a
+place called the Rialto, and a “common ferry” called “the tranect.”  It
+is impossible that he should have had “an intimate knowledge of the
+castle of Elsinore,” though an English _troupe_ of actors visited Denmark
+in 1587.  To Will all this knowledge was _impossible_; for these and many
+more exquisite reasons the yokel’s authorship of the plays is a physical
+impossibility.  But scholars neither invent nor tolerate such strange
+liberties with time and place, with history, geography, and common sense.
+Will Shakspere either did not know what was right, or, more probably, did
+not care, and supposed, like Fielding in the old anecdote, that the
+audience “would not find it out.”  How could a scholar do any of these
+things?  He was as incapable of them as Ben Jonson.  Such sins no scholar
+is inclined to; they have, for him, no temptations.
+
+      [Picture: Facsimile of the Autograph Signature “By me William
+ Shakspeare.”  From one of the Three Sheets of his Will, dated March 25,
+1616.  (From Sir Sidney Lee’s Shakespeare’s Life and Work.  By permission
+                     of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)]
+
+  [Picture: Facsimile of Mark-Signature of John Shakespeare, the Poet’s
+       Father.  From a Deed of Conveyance, dated January 26, 1596]
+
+ [Picture: Facsimile of Mark-Signature of Judith Shakespeare, the Poet’s
+             Second Daughter, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Quiney]
+
+As to Shakspere’s schooling, the Baconians point at the current ignorance
+of Stratford-on-Avon, where many topping burgesses, even aldermen, “made
+their marks,” in place of signing their names to documents.
+Shakespeare’s father, wife, and daughter “made their marks,” in place of
+signing.  So did Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Huntly, when
+she married the cultivated Earl of Bothwell (1566).
+
+There is no evidence, from a roll of schoolboys at Stratford Free Grammar
+School, about 1564–77, that any given boy attended it; for no roll
+exists.  Consequently there is no evidence that Will was a pupil.
+
+“In the Appendix to Malone’s _Life of Shakespeare_ will be found two
+Latin letters, written by alumni of Stratford School contemporary with
+Shakespeare,” says Mr. Collins. {48a}  But though the writers were
+Stratford boys contemporary with Shakespeare, in later life his
+associates, as there is no roll of pupils’ names how do we know, the
+Baconians may ask, that these men were educated at Stratford School?  Why
+not at Winchester, Eton, St. Paul’s, or anywhere?  Need one reply?
+
+Mr. Collins goes on, in his simple confiding way, to state that “one
+letter is by Abraham Sturley, afterwards an alderman of Stratford . . . ”
+Pursuing the facts, we find that Sturley wrote in Latin to “Richard
+Quiney, Shakespeare’s friend,” who, if he could read Sturley’s letter,
+could read Latin.  Then _young_ Richard Quiney, apparently aged eleven,
+wrote in Latin to his father.  If young Richard Quiney be the son of
+Shakespeare’s friend, Richard Quiney, then, of course, his Latin at the
+age of eleven would only prove that, if he were a schoolboy at Stratford,
+_one_ Stratford boy could write Latin in the generation following that of
+Shakespeare.  Thus may reason the Baconians.
+
+Perhaps, however, we may say that if Stratford boys contemporary with
+Shakspere, in his own rank and known to him, learned Latin, which they
+retained in manhood, Shakspere, if he went to school with them, may have
+done as much.
+
+Concerning the school, a Free Grammar School, we know that during
+Shakespeare’s boyhood the Mastership was not disdained by Walter Roche,
+perhaps a Fellow of what was then the most progressive College in
+learning of those at Oxford, namely, Corpus Christi.  That Shakespeare
+could have been his pupil is uncertain; the dates are rather difficult.
+I think it probable that he was not, and we do not know the
+qualifications of the two or three succeeding Masters.
+
+As to the methods of teaching and the books read at Grammar Schools,
+abundance of information has been collected.  We know what the use was in
+one very good school, Ipswich, from 1528; in another in 1611; but as we
+do not possess any special information about Stratford School, Mr.
+Greenwood opposes the admission of evidence from other academies.  A man
+might think that, however much the quality of the teaching varied in
+various free schools, the nominal curriculum would be fairly uniform.
+
+As to the teacher, a good endowment would be apt to attract a capable
+man.  What was the endowment of Stratford School?  It was derived from
+the bequest of Thomas Jolyffe (died 1482), a bequest of lands in
+Stratford and Dodwell, and before the Reformation the Brethren of the
+Guild were “to find a priest fit and able in knowledge to teach grammar
+freely to all scholars coming to him, taking nothing for their teaching
+. . . ”  “The Founder’s liberal endowment made it possible to secure an
+income for the Master by deed.  Under the Reformation, Somerset’s
+Commission found that the School Master had £10 yearly by patent; the
+school was well conducted, and was not confiscated.” {50a}
+
+Baconians can compare the yearly £20 (the salary in 1570–6, which then
+went much further than it does now) with the incomes of other masters of
+Grammar Schools, and thereby find out if the Head-Master was very cheap.
+Mr. Elton (who knew his subject intimately) calls the provision
+“liberal.”  The Head-Master of Westminster had £20 and a house.
+
+As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked and
+answered in Latin.  This method, according to Dr. Rouse of Perse School,
+brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current fashion, as may
+readily be imagined; but experts vary in opinion.  The method, I
+conceive, should give a pupil a vocabulary.  Lilly’s Latin Grammar was
+universally used, and was learned by rote, as by George Borrow, in the
+last century.  See _Lavengro_ for details.  Conversation books,
+_Sententiæ Pueriles_, were in use; with easy books, such as Corderius’s
+_Colloquia_, and so on, for boys were taught to _speak_ Latin, the common
+language of the educated in Europe.  Waifs of the Armada, Spaniards
+wrecked on the Irish coast, met “a savage who knew Latin,” and thus could
+converse with him.  The Eclogues of Mantuanus, a Latin poet of the
+Renaissance (the “Old Mantuan” of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_), were used,
+with Erasmus’s _Colloquia_, and, says Mr. Collins, “such books as Ovid’s
+Metamorphoses” (and other works of his), “the Æneid, selected comedies of
+Terence and Plautus, and portions of Cæsar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy.”
+
+“Pro-di-gi-ous!” exclaims Mr. Greenwood, {51a} referring to what Mr.
+Collins says Will had read at school.  But precocious Latinity was not
+thought “prodigious” in an age when nothing but Latin was taught to
+boys—not even cricket.  Nor is it to be supposed that every boy read in
+all of these authors, still less read all of their works, but these were
+the works of which portions were read.  It is not prodigious.  I myself,
+according to my class-master, was “a bad and careless little boy” at
+thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember reading in Ovid and Cæsar,
+and Sallust, while the rest of my time was devoted to the total neglect
+of the mathematics, English “as she was taught,” History, and whatsoever
+else was expected from me.  Shakespeare’s time was not thus frittered
+away; Latin was all he learned (if he went to school), and, as he was (on
+my theory) a very clever, imaginative kind of boy, I can conceive that he
+was intensely interested in the stories told by Ovid, and in Catiline’s
+Conspiracy (thrilling, if you know your Sallust); and if his interest
+were once aroused, he would make rapid progress.  My own early hatred of
+Greek was hissing and malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was
+changed.  One was intensely interested!
+
+Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr.
+Halliwell-Phillipps, {52a} “Lilly’s Grammar, and a few classical works
+chained to the desks of the free schools.”  Mr. Collins himself gives but
+“a few classical books,” of which _portions_ were read.  The chains were
+in all the free schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right.  The
+chains, if authentic, do not count as objections.
+
+Here it must be noted that Mr. Greenwood’s opinion of Will’s knowledge
+and attainments is not easily to be ascertained with precision.  He sees,
+of course, that the pretension of the extreme Baconians—Will could not
+even write his name—is absurd.  If he could not write, he could not pass
+as the author.  Mr. Greenwood “fears that the arguments” (of a most
+extreme Baconian) “would drive many wandering sheep back to the
+Stratfordian fold.” {52b}
+
+He has therefore to find a _via media_, to present, as the pseudo-author,
+a Will who possessed neither books nor manuscripts when he made his
+Testament; a rustic, bookless Will, speaking a patois, who could none the
+less pass himself off as the author.  So “I think it highly probable,”
+says Mr. Greenwood, “that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford for
+four or five years, and that, later in life, after some years in London,
+he was probably able to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as
+‘Poet-Ape who would be thought our chief.’” {53a}  Again, “He had had but
+little schooling; he had ‘small Latin and less Greek’; but he was a good
+_Johannes Factotum_, he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary,
+‘bumbast out a blank verse.’” {53b}
+
+But this is almost to abandon Mr. Greenwood’s case.  Will appears to me
+to be now perilously near acceptance as Greene’s “Shake-scene,” who was a
+formidable rival to Greene’s three professional playwrights: and quite as
+near to Ben’s Poet-Ape “that would be thought our chief,” who began by
+re-making old plays; then won “some little wealth and credit on the
+scene,” who had his “works” printed (for Ben expects them to reach
+posterity), and whom Ben accused of plagiarism from himself and his
+contemporaries.  But this Shake-scene, this Poet-Ape, is merely our Will
+Shakespeare as described by bitterly jealous and envious rivals.  Where
+are now the “works” of “Poet-Ape” if they are not the works of
+Shakespeare which Ben so nobly applauded later, if they are not in the
+blank verse of Greene’s Shake-scene?  “Shakespeare’s plays” we call them.
+
+_When_ was it “necessary” for the “Stratford rustic” to “bumbast out a
+blank verse”?  Where are the blank verses which he bumbasted out?  For
+what purposes were they bumbasted?  By 1592 “Shake-scene” was ambitious,
+and thought his blank verse as good as the best that Greene’s friends,
+including Marlowe, could write.  He had plenty of time to practise before
+the date when, as Ben wrote, “he would be thought our chief.”  He would
+not cease to do that in which he conceived himself to excel; to write for
+the stage.
+
+When once Mr. Greenwood deems it “highly probable” that Will had four or
+five years of education at a Latin school, Will has as much of
+“grounding” in Latin, I think, as would account for all the knowledge of
+the Roman tongue which he displays.  His amount of teaching at school
+would carry and tempt even a boy who was merely clever, and loved to read
+romantic tales and comic plays, into Ovid and Plautus—English books being
+to him not very accessible.
+
+Here I may speak from my own memories, for though utterly idle where set
+school tasks were concerned, I tried very early to worry the sense out of
+Aristophanes—because he was said to contain good reading.
+
+To this amount of taste and curiosity, nowise unexampled in an ordinary
+clever boy, add _Genius_, and I feel no difficulty as to Will’s
+“learning,” such as, at best, it was.  “The Stratfordian,” says Mr.
+Greenwood, “will ingeminate ‘Genius!  Genius!’” {55a}  I _do_ say
+“Genius,” and stand by it.  The ordinary clever boy, in the supposed
+circumstances, could read and admire his Ovid (though Shakespeare used
+cribs also), the man of genius could write _Venus and Adonis_.
+
+Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily on
+bookless Will’s rusticity and patois.  Accepting Ben Jonson’s account of
+his “excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein
+he flowed with that facility . . . ,” accepting the tradition of his
+lively wit; admitting that he had some Latin and literature, I would find
+in him a sufficiently plausible mask for that immense Unknown with a
+strange taste for furbishing up older plays.  I would merely deny to Will
+his _genius_, and hand _that_ over to Bacon—or Bungay.  Believe me, Mr.
+Greenwood, this is your easiest way!—perhaps this _is_ your way?—the plot
+of the unscrupulous Will, and of your astute Bungay, might thus more
+conceivably escape detection from the pack of envious playwrights.
+
+According to “all tradition,” says Mr. Greenwood, Shakespeare was taken
+from school at the age of thirteen.  Those late long-descended traditions
+of Shakespeare’s youth are of little value as evidence; but, if it
+pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument, accept the whole
+of them.  Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose among the traditions:
+all depends on the genealogical steps by which they reach us, as far as
+these can be discovered. {56a}
+
+According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680, an
+opinion concerning Shakspere’s education reached him.  It came thus;
+there had been an actor in Shakspere’s company, one Phillips, who, dying
+in 1605, left to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling piece of gold; and
+the same “to my servant, Christopher Beeston.”  Christopher’s son,
+William, in 1640, became deputy to Davenant in the management of “the
+King’s and Queen’s Young Company”, and through Beeston, according to
+Aubrey, Davenant learned; through Beeston Aubrey learned, that
+Shakespeare “understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger
+days a school-master in the country.”  Aubrey writes that “old Mr.
+Beeston, whom Mr. Dryden calls ‘the chronicle of the stage,’” died in
+1682. {56b}
+
+This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions.  Phillips, a
+friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher Beeston
+(he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682; he is “the
+chronicle of the stage.”  Through him Davenant gets the story, through
+him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and
+had been a rural dominie.  Mr. Greenwood {57a} devotes much space to
+disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority, _moult
+s’en faut_), but Mr. Greenwood here says not a word as to the steps in
+the descent of the tradition.  He frequently repeats himself, thereby
+forcing me to more iteration than I like.  He had already disparaged
+Aubrey in note I to p. 105, but there he approached so closely to
+historical method as to say that “Aubrey quotes Beeston, a
+seventeenth-century actor, as his authority.”  On p. 209 he dismisses the
+anecdote (which does not suit his book) as “a mere myth.”  “_He_ knows,
+_he_ knows” which traditions are mythical, and which possess a certain
+historical value.
+
+My own opinion is that Shakspere did “know Latin pretty well,” and was no
+_scholar_, as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship.  He left school,
+if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age, twelve, when Bacon
+went to Cambridge.  Will, a clever kind of lad (on my theory), left
+school at an age when some other clever lads became freshmen.  Why not?
+Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have heard as Bishop of Salisbury under
+William III) took his degree at the age of fourteen.
+
+Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing to
+learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I conceive him
+to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be found the most
+wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which could not but please
+his “green unknowing youth.”  In the years before he left Stratford, and
+after he left school (1577–87?), I can easily suppose that he was not
+_always_ butchering calves, poaching, and making love; and that, if he
+could get books in no other way, this graceless fellow might be detected
+on a summer evening, knitting his brows over the stories and jests of the
+chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom desk.  _Moi qui parle_, I
+am no genius; but stories, romance, and humour would certainly have
+dragged me back to the old desks—if better might not be, and why not
+Shakspere?  Put yourself in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and
+if, as a lad, you liked to steal away into the world of romance, into
+fairyland.
+
+If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was a
+marvel of genius.  But I am not here claiming for him genius, but merely
+stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and romance, had no
+English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired as much power of
+reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily gain in four years of
+exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies as he pleased,
+yet be, so far, no prodigy.
+
+I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist;
+if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin
+school.  I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt
+acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of the
+plays must have possessed in youth.  “Tradition says nothing of all
+that,” the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he likes, turn to my
+reply in _The Traditional Shakespeare_. {59a}  Meanwhile, how can you
+expect old clerks and sextons, a century after date, in a place where
+literature was _not_ of supreme interest, to retain a tradition that Will
+used to read sometimes (if he did), in circumstances of privacy?  As far
+as I am able to judge, had I been a boy at Stratford school for four
+years, had been taught nothing but Latin, and had little or no access to
+English books of poetry and romance, I should have acquired about the
+same amount of Latin as I suppose Shakspere to have possessed.  Yet I
+could scarcely, like him, have made the second syllable in “Posthumus”
+long!  Sir Walter Scott, however, was guilty of similar false quantities:
+he and Shakspere were about equally scholarly.
+
+I suppose, then, that Shakspere’s “small Latin” (as Jonson called it)
+enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read sufficient
+for his uses.  As a fact, he made use of English translations, and also
+of Latin texts.  Scholars like Bacon do not use bad translations of easy
+Latin authors.  If Bacon wanted Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek,
+not to an English translation of a French translation of a Latin
+translation.
+
+Some works of Shakespeare, the _Lucrece_, for example, and _The Comedy of
+Errors_ (if he were not working over an earlier canvas from a more
+learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge of Latin texts which in
+his day had not appeared in published translations, or had not been
+translated at all as far as we know.  In my opinion Will had Latin enough
+to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult, for himself.  He
+could also “get a construe,” when in London, or help in reading, from a
+more academic acquaintance: or buy a construe at no high ransom from some
+poor scholar.  No contemporary calls him scholarly; the generation of men
+who were small boys when he died held him for no scholar.  The current
+English literature of his day was saturated with every kind of classical
+information; its readers, even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world
+of lore with which the modern man is seldom acquainted.  The ignorant
+Baconian marvels: the classically educated Baconian who is not familiar
+with Elizabethan literature is amazed.  Really there is nothing worthy of
+their wonder.
+
+Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him
+“_learned_”?  He is “sweet,” “honey-tongued,” “mellifluous,” and so
+forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with the
+compliment of “learned.”  What Ben Jonson thought of his learning (but
+Ben’s standard was very high), what Milton and Fuller, boys of eight when
+he died, thought of his learning, we know.  They thought him “Fancy’s
+child” (Milton) and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with “small
+Latin and less Greek” (Jonson).  They speak of Shakespeare the author and
+actor; not yet had any man divided the persons.
+
+Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the
+classics.  They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense as
+our modern scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr. Swinburne
+among the dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray—if I may be
+pardoned for mentioning contemporary names.  But Elizabethan scholarly
+poets, and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned.  Perhaps few
+modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.  The opinion of
+Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought
+Shakespeare’s scholarship “inexact,” as we shall see.
+
+I conceive that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and, on Ben Jonson’s
+evidence, he knew “less Greek.”  That he knew _any_ Greek is surprising.
+Apparently he did, to judge from Ben’s words.  My attitude must, to the
+Baconians, seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive.  I cannot pretend to
+know what was Shakspere’s precise amount of proficiency in Latin when he
+was writing the plays.  That between his own knowledge, and construes
+given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not
+yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.
+
+Mr. Greenwood says “the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere must
+have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free School
+is positively amazing.” {62a}  But I have shown how an imaginative boy,
+with little or no access to English poetry and romances, might continue
+to read Latin “for human pleasure” after he left school.  As a
+professional writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now
+they are rare in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in
+his reading.  Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of
+genius.  “And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this
+prodigious industry. . . . ”  I am not speaking of “prodigious industry,”
+and of that—at school.  In a region so non-literary as, by his account,
+was Stratford, Mr. Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will’s
+early reading (even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed)
+to exist, from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the
+memories of the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none
+of these things.  The thing is not reasonable. {62b}
+
+Let me take one example {62c} of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as
+saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare’s debt to Seneca’s then untranslated
+paper _De Clementia_ (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I).  It inspires Portia’s
+speech about Mercy.  Here I give a version of the Latin.
+
+“Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief
+magistrate (_principem_) . . . No one can think of anything more becoming
+to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed the fairer and
+more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher office . . .
+But if the placable and just gods punish not instantly with their
+thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just it is that a
+man set over men should gently exercise his power.  What?  Holds not he
+the place nearest to the gods, who, bearing himself like the gods, is
+kind, and generous, and uses his power for the better? . . .  Think . . .
+what a lone desert and waste Rome would be, were nothing left, and none,
+save such as a severe judge would absolve.”
+
+The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia’s speech:
+
+          “Consider this
+    That in the course of Justice none of us
+    Should see salvation.”
+
+Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia’s
+eloquence.
+
+Now take Portia:
+
+    “The quality of Mercy is not strain’d;
+    It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
+    Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
+    It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;”
+
+(Not much Seneca, so far!)
+
+    “’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
+    The thronèd monarch better than his crown;
+    His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
+    The attribute to awe and majesty,
+    Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
+    But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,
+    It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
+    It is an attribute to God himself;
+    And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
+    When mercy seasons justice . . . ”
+
+There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already
+cited, and theological in origin.
+
+Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections,
+without having read Seneca’s _De Clementia_, whether, if he could not
+conceive the ideas “out of his own head,” he might not hear Seneca’s
+words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or read them cited in
+an English book, each reader must decide for himself.  Nor do I doubt
+that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast
+his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero.
+
+My view of Shakespeare’s Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter
+Raleigh. {64a}  As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by
+people who approach the subject, and who have had a classical education.
+An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed
+in the following chapter.
+
+In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did
+(and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing).
+Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.  “His plays,”
+says Sir Walter Raleigh, “are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris
+of popular literature,—scraps and tags and broken ends of songs and
+ballads and romances and proverbs.  In this respect he is notable even
+among his contemporaries. . . .  Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Benedick,
+Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in _Lear_ and the Grave-digger in _Hamlet_,
+even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . ”
+{65a}  He is rich in rural proverbs _not_ recorded in Bacon’s _Promus_.
+
+Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, “was making himself
+all the time.”
+
+The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete
+rural words.  Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the tags of
+song, ballad, story, and _dicton_.  But so may Shakespeare.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE’S LEARNING
+
+
+THAT Shakspere, whether “scholar” or not, had a very wide and deep
+knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole field of
+the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr. Greenwood seems to
+admire in that “violent Stratfordian,” Mr. Churton Collins. {69a}  I
+think that Mr. Collins did not persuade classical scholars who have never
+given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their merits
+the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide classical knowledge?  Does he
+use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?
+
+My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide
+reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay’s.  It was his native
+tendency to find coincidences in poetic passages (which, to some, to me
+for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to explain
+coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing.  One remarked in him
+these tendencies long before he wrote on the classical acquirements of
+Shakespeare.
+
+While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of
+authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned
+coincidences.  The question is of the widest range.  Some inquirers
+explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales, proverbs,
+and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a single centre
+(usually India).  Others, like myself, do not deny cases of transmission,
+but in other cases see spontaneous and independent, though coincident
+invention.  I do not believe that the Arunta of Central Australia
+borrowed from Plutarch the central feature of the myth of Isis and
+Osiris.
+
+It is not on Shakespeare’s use, now and then, of Greek and Latin models
+and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins himself, and not
+earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the saturation of
+Shakespeare’s mind with Roman and Athenian literature.  Consequently we
+can only do justice to Mr. Collins’s system, if we compare example after
+example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare’s borrowing.  This is a
+long and irksome task; and the only fair plan is for the reader to peruse
+Mr. Collins’s _Studies in Shakespeare_, compare the Greek and Roman
+texts, and weigh each example of supposed borrowing for himself.
+Baconians must delight in this labour.
+
+I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare
+to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays of Plautus made
+by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the _Menæchmi_ as the
+model of _The Comedy of Errors_.  He does not borrow phrases from it, as
+he does from North’s _Plutarch_.
+
+_Venus and Adonis_ owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple
+patches, scattered in different parts of the _Metamorphoses_.  _Lucrece_
+is based on the then untranslated _Fasti_ of Ovid.  I do not think
+Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or too
+proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor young
+University man in London.  That is a simple and natural means by which he
+could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or poem; and
+ought not to be overlooked.
+
+Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare’s wide and profound
+knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: “Nothing which
+Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with certainty that he
+read the Greek classics in the original, or even that he possessed enough
+Greek to follow the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek text.”
+{71a}  In that case, how did Shakespeare’s English become contaminated,
+as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek _idioms_, while he only knew the
+Greek plays through Latin translations?
+
+However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove
+Shakespeare’s close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic
+literature by a method of which he knows the perils—“it is always
+perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may be
+mere coincidences.” {72a}  Yet this method is what he practises
+throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for
+himself.
+
+He thinks it “surely not unlikely” that Polonius’s
+
+    “Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
+    For loan oft loses both itself and friend,”
+
+may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (_Trinummus_, iv.
+3).  Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there were a
+well-known reflection from experience it is this of the borrowers and
+lenders.
+
+Next, take this of Plautus (_Pseudolus_, I, iv. 7–10), “But just as the
+poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among
+men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere fiction.”
+We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus’s theory of the
+origin of the belief in fairies:
+
+    “And as imagination bodies forth
+    The _forms_ of things unknown, the poet’s pen
+    Turns them to _shapes_, and gives to airy nothing
+    A local habitation and a name.”
+
+The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth _forms_, and the poet’s
+pen turns them to _shapes_.  But to suppose that Shakespeare here
+borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.
+
+These are samples of Mr. Collins’s methods throughout.
+
+Of Terence there were translations—first in part; later, in 1598, of the
+whole.  Of Seneca there was an English version (1581).  Mr. Collins
+labours to show that one passage “almost certainly” implies Shakespeare’s
+use of the Latin; but it was used “by an inexact scholar,”—a terribly
+inexact scholar, if he thought that “_alienus_” (“what belongs to
+another”) meant “slippery”!
+
+Most of the passages are from plays (_Titus Andronicus_ and _Henry VI_,
+i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually) to _his_ author, the
+Great Unknown.  Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes
+Shakespeare’s to resemble Seneca’s _Latin_ style: Shakespeare, then, took
+up Greek tragedy in later life; after the early period when he dealt with
+Seneca.  Here is a sample of borrowing from Horace, “_Persicos odi puer
+apparatus_” (_Odes_. I, xxxviii. I).  Mr. Collins quotes _Lear_ (III, vi.
+85) thus, “You will say they are _Persian attire_.”  Really, Lear in his
+wild way says to Edgar, “I do not like the fashion of your garments: you
+will say they are Persian; but let them be changed.”  Mr. Collins changes
+this into “you will say they are _Persian attire_,” a phrase “which could
+only have occurred to a classical scholar.”  The phrase is not in
+Shakespeare, and Lear’s wandering mind might as easily select “Persian”
+as any other absurdity.
+
+So it is throughout.  Two great poets write on the fear of death, on the
+cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination in nature,
+on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified by
+poetry,—and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius or
+Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study the
+Latin passages which he does not quote.  So arbitrary is taste in these
+matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently, finds
+Shakespeare putting a thought from the _Alcibiades I_ of Plato into the
+mouth of Achilles in _Troilus and Cressida_, while Mr. J. M. Robertson
+suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca—where Mr. Collins does not
+find “the smallest parallel.”  Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author
+of _Troilus_ makes Ulysses quote Plato as “the author” of a remark, and
+makes Achilles take up the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.
+
+Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
+taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by the
+Achæans!
+
+There were Latin translations of Plato; the _Alcibiades I_ was published
+apart, from Ficinus’ version, in 1560, with the sub-title, _Concerning
+the Nature of Man_.  Who had read it?—Shakespeare, or one of the two
+authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another _Troilus and Cressida_ (now
+lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown?  Which of these Platonists
+chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long before Homer?  Which of
+them followed the Ionic and mediæval anti-Achæan view of Homer’s heroes,
+as given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book
+VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors?  _Troilus
+and Cressida_ is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read
+Ficinus’ version of the _Alcibiades_; {75a} and yet made the monstrous
+anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war.  “That
+was his fun,” as Charles Lamb said in another connection.
+
+Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the “small Latin” with
+which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare.  He could read Latin,
+Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French—that is,
+as easily as he reads English.  Still further, Shakespeare, through Latin
+translations, was so saturated with the Greek drama “that the
+characteristics which differentiate his work from the work of his
+contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists
+are actually attributable to these dramatists.”
+
+Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as far
+as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much
+acquaintance with Euripides, Æschylus, Sophocles, and do not often remind
+us of these masters.  Shakespeare does remind us of them—the only
+question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession of a genius
+akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all the
+treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling up
+through the wells of Avon?
+
+But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, _cannot_ be demonstrated)
+that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians?  He begins by
+saying that he will not bottom his case “on the ground of parallels in
+sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely
+to be” (fortuitous) “coincidences.”  Three pages of such parallels, all
+from Sophocles, therefore follow.  “Curiously close similarities of
+expression” are also barred.  Four pages of examples therefore follow,
+from Sophocles and Æschylus, plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer
+too (once!).  Again, “identities of sentiment under similar
+circumstances” are not to be cited; two pages _are_ cited; and
+“similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,”
+cannot safely be used; several pages of them follow.
+
+Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the _Aias_ of Sophocles, and
+tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from _Titus Andronicus_,
+which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-Shakespearean, or not by his
+unknown great author.  _Troilus and Cressida_, whatever part Shakespeare
+may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author or authors knew of
+Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first translated by
+Chapman and published in 1598.  But he or they did know the _Aias_ of
+Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did the author of _Romeo and
+Juliet_.
+
+Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks are,
+Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew the
+Greek tragedians.  “We have obviously to be on our guard” {77a} against
+three kinds of such parallels, which “may be mere coincidences,” {77b}
+fortuitous coincidences.  But these coincidences against which “we must
+be on our guard” fill sixteen pages (pp. 46–63).  These pages must
+necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading the
+reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately as Mr.
+Collins did.  Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels to
+readers of Mr. Collins’s essay.  Indeed, what more can we do?  Who would
+read through a criticism of each instance?  Two or three may be given.
+The Queen in _Hamlet_ reminds that prince, grieving for his father’s
+death, that “all that live must die”:
+
+    “That loss is common to the race,
+    And common is the common-place.”
+
+The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,—and here is a
+parallel!  Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious
+expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof.  Greece
+agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that it
+is not lucky to be “a corby messenger” of bad news; or that all goes ill
+when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from
+the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a
+righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to
+Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that, having lost
+a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,—and so on as long
+as you please.  Of such wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and
+Europeans have many parallel proverbs.  _Vestigia nulla retrorsum_ is as
+well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.  Manifestly nothing in this kind
+proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was saturated in Greek
+tragedy.  But page on page of such facts as that both Shakespeare and
+Sophocles talk, one of “the belly-pinched wolf,” the other of “the
+empty-bellied wolf,” are apt to impress the reader—and verily both
+Shakespeare and Æschylus talk of “the heart dancing for joy.”  Mr.
+Collins repeats that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling
+them up.  It was a theory of Shakespeare’s time that the apparent ghost
+of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil.  Hamlet
+knows this—
+
+    “The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.”
+
+Orestes (_Electra_, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging
+dæmon (_alastor_) in the shape of a god, that bids him avenge his father.
+Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any
+contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?
+
+A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in
+_Romeo and Juliet_, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her
+bridegroom.  Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology—
+
+    “For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.”
+
+One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels.  But
+confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove that
+Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.
+
+To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such
+commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their
+latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own
+names.
+
+The situations, in _Hamlet_ and the _Choephoræ_ and _Electra_, are so
+close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr.
+Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all:
+the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the murder of
+Agamemnon.
+
+Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between
+Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and
+_Beowulf_ and the Njal’s saga, yet Norsemen and the early Irish were not
+students of Homer!  The parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the
+Old Irish _Tain Bo Cualgne_, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous
+and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has actually occurred
+to a distinguished Greek scholar.  But no student of Irish and
+Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I think, to suggest that Early
+Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels knew Greek.  The curious may
+consult Mr. Munro Chadwick’s _The Heroic Age_ (1912), especially Chapter
+XV, “The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,” and
+to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.
+
+But, to be short, Mr. Collins’s case can only be judged by readers of his
+most interesting _Studies in Shakespeare_.  To me, Hamlet’s soliloquy on
+death resembles a fragment from the _Phœnix_ of Euripides no more closely
+than two sets of reflections by great poets on the text that “of death we
+know nothing” are bound to do,—though Shakespeare’s are infinitely the
+richer.  For Shakespeare’s reflections on death, save where Christians
+die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-Æschylean
+Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets.  In many respects, as Mr. Collins
+proves, Shakespeare’s highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone.  But
+of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats,
+who of Greek knew nothing.  In the same way, a peculiar vein of
+Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric,
+though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet’s lines on
+old age, _sine amore jocisque_, borrowed from Mimnermus!  There is such a
+thing as congruity of genius.  Mr. Collins states the hypothesis—not his
+own—“that _by a certain natural affinity_ Shakespeare caught also the
+accent and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of
+Greek tragedy.”
+
+Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins’s long array of Greek
+parallels, I do hold that by “natural affinity,” by congruity of genius,
+Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.
+
+One thing seems certain to me.  If Shakspere read and borrowed from Greek
+poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew it; and
+remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins’s extraordinary tenacity of
+memory.
+
+Now if “Shakespeare” did all that, he was not the actor.  The author, on
+Mr. Collins’s showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent
+student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its fragments.
+The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon’s works, that
+he was such a student.
+
+Mr. Collins, “a violent Stratfordian,” overproved his case.  If his
+proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as well
+as did Mr. Swinburne.  If the author of the plays were so learned, the
+actor was not the author, in my opinion—he _was_, in the opinion of Mr.
+Collins.
+
+If Shakespeare’s spirit and those of Sophocles and Æschylus meet, it is
+because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with “the poet’s
+sad lucidity” the same “pageant of men’s miseries.”  But how dissimilar
+in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the
+austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins’s parallels.
+
+Polynices, in the _Phœnissæ_ of Euripides (504–506), exclaims:
+
+    “To the stars’ risings, and the sun’s I’d go,
+    And dive ’neath earth,—if I could do this thing,—
+    Possess Heaven’s highest boon of sovereignty.”
+
+Then compare Hotspur:
+
+    “By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
+    To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,
+    Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
+    Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
+    And pluck up drownèd honour by the locks,
+    So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear
+    Without corrival all her dignities.”
+
+What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur’s mind!  Is
+Shakespeare thinking of the _Phœnissæ_, or is he speaking only on the
+promptings of his genius?
+
+
+
+
+V
+SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY
+
+
+A PHRASE has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare’s
+work, namely, “congruity of genius,” which is apt to be resented by
+Baconians.  Perhaps they have a right to resent it, for “genius” is hard
+to define, and genius is invoked by some wild wits to explain feats of
+Shakespeare’s which (to Baconians) appear “miracles.”  A “miracle” also
+is notoriously hard to define; but we may take it (“under all reserves”)
+to stand for the occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action
+which, to the speaker who applies the word “miracle,” seems “impossible.”
+The speaker therefore says, “The event is impossible; miracles do not
+happen: therefore the reported event never occurred.  The alleged
+performance, the writing of the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a
+miracle, therefore was done by some person or persons other than the
+actor.”  This idea of the _impossibility_ of the player’s authorship is
+the foundation of the Baconian edifice.
+
+I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood’s view
+of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere.  If Will were
+what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will’s authorship of the plays
+seems to me, “humanly speaking,” impossible.  But then Mr. Greenwood
+appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance that Will _may_
+have been, not merely “a sharp boy” but a boy of great parts; and not
+without a love of stories and poetry: a passion which, in a bookless
+region, could only be gratified through folk-song, folk-tale, and such
+easy Latin as he might take the trouble to read.  If we add to these very
+unusual but not wholly impossible tastes and abilities, that Will _may_
+have been a lad of genius, there is no more “miracle” in his case than in
+other supreme examples of genius.  “But genius cannot work miracles,
+cannot do what is impossible.”  Do what is impossible to whom?  To the
+critics, the men of common sense.
+
+Alas, all this way of talking about “miracles,” and “the impossible,” and
+“genius” is quite vague and popular.  What do we mean by “genius”?  The
+Latin term originally designates, not a man’s everyday intellect, but a
+spirit from without which inspires him, like the “Dæmon,” or, in Latin,
+“Genius” of Socrates, or the _lutin_ which rode the pen of Molière.
+“Genius” is claimed for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford
+monument, erected at latest some six years after his death.  Following
+this path of thought we come to “inspiration”: the notion of it, as
+familiar to Australian savages as to any modern minds, is that, to the
+poet, what he produces is _given_ by some power greater than himself, by
+the _Boilyas_ (spirits) or Pundjel, the Father of all.  This palæolithic
+psychology, of course, is now quite discredited, yet the term “genius” is
+still (perhaps superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose
+intellectual faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals, and who
+do marvels with means apparently inadequate.
+
+In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put—in place
+of the Muses or the _Boilyas_, or the Genius—what they call the
+“Subliminal Self,” something “far more deeply interfused than the
+everyday intellect.”  This subconscious self, capable of far more than
+the conscious intelligence, is genius.
+
+On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher
+in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect
+which, for example, pens this page.
+
+Thus as soon as we begin to speak of “genius,” we are involved in
+speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical; in
+difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by
+physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical
+research, or by the study of heredity.  When I speak of “the genius of
+Shakespeare,” of Jeanne d’Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly
+have a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood,
+when he uses the term “genius”; so we are apt to misunderstand each
+other.  Yet we all glibly use the term “genius,” without definition and
+without discussion.
+
+At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against “that fool of a word,” as
+Napoleon said, “impossible.”  At once, on either side, we assume that we
+know what is possible and what is impossible,—and so pretend to
+omniscience.
+
+Thus some “Stratfordians,” or defenders of the actor’s authorship,
+profess to know—from all the signed work of Bacon, and from all that has
+reached us about Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, from 1590 to
+1605—that the theory of Bacon’s authorship of the plays is “impossible.”
+I, however, do not profess this omniscience.
+
+On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that _he_ knows, or
+thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor’s education, conditions of
+life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of the actor is
+“impossible.”
+
+Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more
+about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life,
+than we know about the actor; while about “the potentialities of genius,”
+we know—very little.
+
+Thus, with all Bacon’s occupations and preoccupations, he had, the
+Baconians will allow, _genius_.  By the miracle of genius he _may_ have
+found time and developed inclination, to begin by furbishing up older
+plays for a company of actors: he did it extremely well, but what a
+quaint taste for a courtier and scholar!  The eccentricities of genius
+_may_ account for his choice of a “_nom de plume_,” which, if he desired
+concealment, was the last that was likely to serve his turn.  He may also
+have divined all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom,
+conceivably, he did not much frequent.
+
+I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written _Hamlet_ “if
+he had the mind,” as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth.  Not at all; I am
+the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
+
+But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too had
+genius in that amazing degree which, in _Henry V_, the Bishop of Ely and
+the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss in the case of the
+young king.  In this passage we perceive that the poet had brooded over
+and been puzzled by the “miracle” (he uses the word) of genius.  Says
+Canterbury speaking of the Prince’s wild youth,
+
+    “Never was such a sudden scholar made.”
+
+One Baconian objection to Shakespeare’s authorship is that during his
+early years in London (say 1587–92) he was “such a sudden scholar made”
+in various things.
+
+The young king’s
+
+       “addiction was to courses vain,
+    His companies unletter’d, rude, and shallow,”
+
+precisely like Shakespeare’s courses and companions at Stratford
+
+    “Had never noted in him any study.”
+
+Stratford tradition, a century after Shakespeare left the town, did not
+remember “any study” in him; none had been “noted,” nor could have been
+remembered.  To return to Henry, he shines in divinity, knowledge of
+“commonwealth affairs,”
+
+    “You would say, it hath been all in all his study.”
+
+He is as intimate with the art of war; to him “Gordian knots of policy”
+are “familiar as his garter.”  He _must_ have
+
+    “The art and practic part of life,”
+
+as “mistress to this theorie,”
+
+    “Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,”
+
+as his youth was riotous, and was lived in all men’s gaze,
+
+    “And never noted in him any study,
+    Any retirement, any sequestration
+    From open haunts and popularity.”
+
+The Bishop of Ely can only suggest that Henry’s study or “contemplation”
+
+    “Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
+    Unseen,”
+
+and Canterbury says
+
+    “It must be so, for miracles are ceased.”
+
+And thus the miracle of genius baffles the poet, for Henry’s had been
+“noisy nights,” notoriously noisy.
+
+Now, as we shall later show, Bacon’s rapid production of the plays,
+considering his other contemporary activities and varied but always
+absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as the sudden blossoming of
+Henry’s knowledge and accomplishments; for all Bacon’s known exertions
+and occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing interest, were remote
+from the art of tragedy and comedy.  If we are to admit the marvel of
+genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits we know much, by parity of
+reasoning we may grant that the actor, of whom we know much less, may
+have had genius: had powers and could use opportunities in a way for
+which Baconians make no allowance.
+
+We now turn to Mr. Greenwood’s chapter, “Shakespeare and ‘Genius.’”  It
+opens with the accustomed list of poor Will’s disqualifications, “a boy
+born of illiterate parents,” but we need not rehearse the list. {91a}  He
+“comes to town” (date unknown) “a needy adventurer”; in 1593 appeared the
+poem _Venus and Adonis_, author’s name being printed as “W. Shakespeare.”
+Then comes _Lucrece_ (1594).  In 1598 _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, printed as
+“corrected and augmented” by “W. Shakespere.”  And so on with all the
+rest.  Criticism of the learning and splendour of the two poems follows.
+To _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, and the amusing things written about it by
+Baconians, I return; and to Shakespeare’s “impossible” knowledge of
+courtly society, his “polish and urbanity,” his familiar acquaintance
+with contemporary French politics, foreign proverbs, and “the gossip of
+the Court” of Elizabeth: these points are made by His Honour Judge Webb.
+
+All this lore to Shakespeare is “impossible”—he could not read, say some
+Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none; on these points I have
+said my say.  The omniscient Baconians know that all the early works
+ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a man of, say thirty—who _was_
+no more, and _knew_ no more, than they know that the actor was and knew;
+and as for “Genius,” it cannot work miracles.  Genius “bestows upon no
+one a knowledge of facts,” “Shakespeare, however favoured by nature,
+could impart only what he had learned.”
+
+Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness) has a way
+of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary “dull intelligent man”
+gains none.  Keen interest, keen curiosity, swift observation, even the
+power of tearing out the things essential from a book, the gift of rapid
+reading; the faculty of being alive to the fingertips,—these, with a
+tenacious memory, may enable a small boy to know more facts of many sorts
+than his elders and betters and all the neighbours.  They are puzzled, if
+they make the discovery of his knowledge.  Scott was such a small boy;
+whether we think him a man of genius or not.  Shakspere, even the actor,
+was, perhaps, a man of genius, and possessed this power of rapid
+acquisition and vivid retention of all manner of experience and
+information.  To what I suppose to have been his opportunities in London,
+I shall return.  Meanwhile, let the doubter take up any popular English
+books of Shakespeare’s day: he will find them replete with much knowledge
+wholly new to him—which he will also find in Shakespeare.
+
+A good example is this: Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of
+scientific lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were much on
+a level.  Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts
+staggered him, as a “Stratfordian.”  A friend told me that he too was
+equally moved.  I replied that these pseudoscientific “facts” had long
+been commonplaces.  Pliny was a rich source of them.  Professor Dowden
+took the matter up, with full knowledge, {93a} and reconverted Mr.
+Tyrrell, who wrote: “I am not versed in the literature of the
+Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians who put forward the
+parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences were peculiar
+to the writings of the philosopher and the poet.  Professor Dowden has
+proved that this is not so.” {93b}
+
+Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by
+requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers’s papers on “The
+Mechanism of Genius” (in his _Human Personality_), and to consider the
+humble problem of “Calculating Boys,” which is touched on also by
+Cardinal Newman.  How do they, at the age of innocence, arrive at their
+amazing results?  How did the child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid, work out
+the Euclidean propositions of “bars and rounds,” as he called lines and
+circles?  Science has no solution!
+
+Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of human
+nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners and
+matter of war) Jeanne d’Arc;—and science, I fancy, is much to seek for a
+reply.
+
+Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns.  The
+parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much to Mr.
+Greenwood’s advantage as he supposes.  The genius of Burns, of course, is
+far indeed below the level of that of the author of the Shakespearean
+plays.  But that author and Burns have this in common with each other
+(and obviously with Homer), that their work arises from a basis of older
+materials, already manipulated by earlier artists.  Burns almost always
+has a key-note already touched, as confessedly in the poems of his
+predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or
+artistic, and so forth.  He “alchemised” his materials, as Mr. Greenwood
+says of his author of the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into
+marble.  Notoriously much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.
+
+The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish
+school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek; in
+fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French;
+and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry’s _Wallace_; Locke’s
+_Essay_; _The Spectator_, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots poets
+of his century, with a world of old Scots songs.  These things, and such
+as these, were Burns’s given literary materials.  He used them in the
+only way open to him, in poems written for a rural audience, and
+published for an Edinburgh public.  No classical, no theatrical materials
+were given; or, if he read the old drama, he could not, in his rural
+conditions, and in a Scotland where the theatre was in a very small way,
+venture on producing plays, for which there was no demand, while he had
+no knowledge of the Stage.  Burns found and filled the only channels open
+to him, in a printed book, and in music books for which he transmuted old
+songs.
+
+The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with
+reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical;
+and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to him
+was the theatre.  Badly as it paid the outside author, there was nothing
+that paid better.  _Venus and Adonis_ brought “more praise than pudding,”
+if one may venture a guess.  With the freedom of the theatre Will could
+soar to all heights and plumb all depths.  No such opportunity had Burns,
+even if he could have used it, and, owing to a variety of causes, his
+spirit soon ceased to soar high or wing wide.
+
+I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current
+Elizabethan light literature—_Euphues_, Lyly’s Court comedies, novels
+full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney—his _Defence of
+Poesy_, and _Arcadia_ (1590)—with scores of tales translated from the
+Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign society, and discourses
+of knights and ladies.  He saw the plays of the day, perhaps as one of
+“the groundlings.”  He often beheld Society, from without, when acting
+before the Queen and at great houses.  He had thus, if I am right,
+sufficient examples of style and manner, and knowledge of how the great
+were supposed (in books) to comport and conduct themselves.  The books
+were cheap, and could be borrowed, and turned over at the booksellers’
+stalls. {96a}  The Elizabethan style was omnipresent.  Suppose that
+Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover of reading, a rapid reader with an
+excellent memory, easily influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I
+really think that my conjectures are not too audacious.  Not only “the
+man in the street,” but “the reading public” (so loved by Coleridge),
+have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man
+reads.  Watch them poring for hours over a newspaper!  Let me quote what
+Sir Walter Raleigh says: {97a} “Shakespeare was one of those swift and
+masterly readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing
+that is dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick
+discernment of all that brings them new information, or jumps with their
+thought, or tickles their fancy.  Such a reader will have done with a
+volume in a few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for
+years.  He is a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a
+learned man.”
+
+I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was Dr.
+Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.  The
+accomplishment is only a marvel to—well, I need not be particular about
+the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!
+
+Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
+passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted
+by Mr. Greenwood {97b} from Mr. Morgan. {97c}
+
+Genius, says Mr. Morgan, “did not guide Burns’s untaught pen to write of
+Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.”  No! that was not Burns’s lay; nor
+would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews
+professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote _The Epigoniad_, and sang of Cadmeian
+Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend.  The public of 1780–90
+did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the
+literature accessible to Burns full of the mediæval legends of Troy and
+Athens.  But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the
+_mediæval_ legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, _not_ of
+Homer, Will made his market.  Egypt he knew only in the new English
+version of Plutarch’s _Lives_; of Homer, he (or the author of _Troilus
+and Cressida_) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman’s new translation (1598).
+For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton’s
+_Destruction of Troy_, still reprinted as a _popular_ book as late as
+1713.  Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, “reproduce the very counterfeit
+civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and passed into
+history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . ”  He bestowed
+the manners of mediæval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks.  He
+accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke.  He gave Scotland cannon
+three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.
+Look at his notion of “the very manners” of early post-Roman Britain in
+_Cymbeline_ and _King Lear_!  Concerning “the anomalous status of a King
+of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings” the author of _Macbeth_
+knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth
+concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a
+blacksmith’s bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but
+a tissue of sophisticated legends.  The author of the plays had no
+knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of “matters
+of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out
+of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to
+treat of or schools to teach!”
+
+_Mon Dieu_! do historians _not_ treat of “matters of curious research”
+and of statutes and of treaties?  As for “old romances,” they were
+current and popular.  The “occult” sources of _King Lear_ are a popular
+tale attached to legendary “history” and a story in Sidney’s _Arcadia_.
+Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as “a letterless peasant lad,” or the
+Author, whoever he was, is not “invested with all the love” (_sic_,
+_v.1._ “lore”), “which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books
+and buried and forgotten.”
+
+“Our friend’s style has flowery components,” Mr. Greenwood adds to this
+deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, “and yet
+Shakespeare who did all this,” _et cætera_.  But Shakespeare did _not_ do
+“all this”!  We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one
+of which “Delphos” is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed,
+with his contaminated legends; North’s _Plutarch_, done out of the
+French; older plays, and the rest of it.  Shakespeare does not go to
+Tighernach and the _Hennskringla_ for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga
+which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the
+State Papers.  Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up
+“clasped books, buried and forgotten.”  There is no original research;
+the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of
+uncritical history which were current in his day.  Mr. Greenwood knows
+that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away
+by the Muse of Eloquence.  And the common Baconian may believe Mr.
+Morgan.
+
+But Mr. Greenwood asks “what was the poetic output?” in Burns’s case.
+{100a}  It was what we know, and _that_ was what suited his age and his
+circumstances.  It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama,
+for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter in
+Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.
+
+Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have
+suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.  I
+have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the
+all-pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the
+wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the
+great banquet of the classics,—with such history, wholly uncritical, as
+Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously
+provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and
+Court plays; and in the current popular _Morte d’Arthur_ and _Destruction
+of Troy_.
+
+I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that “Genius is a
+potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it
+will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is
+associated, and the opportunities that are open to it—in a word, on the
+circumstances of its environment.” {101a}
+
+Of course by “moral qualities,” a character without spot or stain is not
+intended: we may take that for granted.  Otherwise, I agree; and think
+that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was
+in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with “the
+circumstances of its environment.”  Without the “environment,” no Jeanne
+d’Arc,—without the environment, no Shakespeare.
+
+To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of “the light
+people,” the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like
+Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their
+pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays,
+and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers’ tales, the seamen’s
+company, the vision of the Court, the gallants, the beauties; and he
+needed the People, of whom he does not speak in the terms of such a
+philanthropist as Bacon professedly was.  Not as an aristocrat, a
+courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does not like, though he
+thoroughly understands, the mob.  Like Alceste (in _Le Misanthrope_ of
+Poquelin), he might say,
+
+    “_L’Ami du genre humain n’est point du tout mon fait_.”
+
+In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob.  This reminds
+one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study-haunting, or
+law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon make
+acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers, and
+carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all
+Shakespeare’s crowd of people hanging loose on the town?
+
+It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners
+of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and
+conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of
+what is called “low life.”
+
+If you reply, as regards Bacon, “his genius divined the Costards and
+Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs,
+and carters, from a hint or two, a glance,” I answer that Will had much
+better sources for _them_ in his own experience of life, and had
+conventional poetic sources for his courtiers—of whom, in the quick, he
+saw quite as much as Molière did of his _Marquis_.
+
+But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting for
+Bacon’s pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by Lord Penzance,
+that aged Judge.  The way is short.  These pictures of rural life and
+character were interpolated into the plays of Bacon by his collaborator,
+William Shakspere, actor, “who prepared the plays for the stage.”  This
+brilliant suggestion is borrowed from Mr. Appleton Morgan. {103a}
+
+Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it _is_ difficult to see how
+Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of character
+which he could scarcely draw “from the life.”  I am willing to ascribe
+miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the honour
+to the actor, “who prepared the plays for the stage.”
+
+Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I
+believe in “Genius.”  Shakespeare and Molière did not live in “Society,”
+though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over the invisible
+barrier between the actor and the great people in whose houses or palaces
+he takes the part of Entertainer.  The rest they divined, by genius.
+
+Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
+Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not at
+Court, not in the study, did he meet them.  How then did he create his
+multitude of very low-lived persons?  Rustics and rural constables he
+_may_ have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of
+other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company.  So you have to
+admit “Genius,”—the miracle of “Genius” in your Bacon,—to an even greater
+extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you
+may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.
+
+Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
+different genius, education, and environment.  Burns could easily get at
+the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare at
+Stratford, if he had written any lyrics.  Suppose him to be a poet, an
+observer, a wit, a humorist.  Tradition at Stratford says something about
+the humorist, and tradition, _in similar circumstances_, would have
+remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.
+
+Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged
+to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen,
+to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles,
+with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney.  Some sorts of
+park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so
+lightly as Burns did,—some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot
+at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was in
+troubles many.  Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance.
+Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he
+tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory.  His opinion
+of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently
+expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.
+
+Something must be done!  Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny
+that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have
+seen and talked with them, and been attracted.  He was a practical man,
+and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading
+straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a
+small brigade of boys as his deputies.  According to Ben Jonson he shone
+in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that
+terrible bar!  The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house
+as a “servitor”—a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.
+
+By 1592, when Greene wrote his _Groatsworth_, “Shakescene” thinks he can
+bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an
+author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company,
+is a rival to be dreaded by Greene’s three author friends: whoever they
+were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think
+that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.
+
+Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say, five
+years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with the
+stage.  Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good deal of
+very mixed society—writing men, bookish young blades, young blades who
+haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the
+gallants.
+
+What follows?  Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps,
+after the play, if an actor seems to be good company.  This is quite
+natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to
+stand aloof from any amusing company.  They found it among
+prize-fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact
+that he was a lord.  Moreover there were no women on the stage to
+distract the attention of the gallants.  The players, says Asinius Lupus,
+in Jonson’s _Poetaster_, “corrupt young gentry very much, I know it.”  I
+take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. {106a}  They could not corrupt the
+young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them.  From Ben’s
+_Poetaster_, which bristles with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also
+quotes a railing address by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor,
+“There are some of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and
+suspected to ha’ some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and
+breaking of jests; _and are companions for gallants_.  A man may skelder
+ye, now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so.” {107a}  We think of
+Nigel Olifaunt in _The Fortunes of Nigel_; but better gallants might
+choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.
+
+To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse
+acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to
+show misunderstanding of human nature.  The players were, when
+unprotected by men of rank, “vagabonds.”  The citizens of London, mainly
+Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans.
+The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and
+great houses.  The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their
+acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated
+playwrights.  Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge “Parnassus”
+plays of _c._ 1600–2.  In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted Dogberry in
+Shakespeare’s company, and was in favour, says Heywood, with Queen
+Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: “For Londoners, who of
+more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe?  He is not counted a
+gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.”  It is not my
+opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be, as much “in
+Society” as is possible for a mere literary man.  I do not, in fancy, see
+him wooing a Maid of Honour.  He was a man’s man, a peer might be
+interested in him as easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a
+musician, _que sçais-je_?  Southampton, discovering his qualities, may
+have been more interested, interested in a better way.
+
+In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human
+nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome,
+popular Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested
+himself in the poet.  There followed the dedication to the Earl of _Venus
+and Adonis_; a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).
+
+Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an
+Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate.  The mere
+fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that of _Lucrece_,
+proves that the Earl did not share the surprise of Mr. Greenwood.  He,
+conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew the real concealed author, and
+the secret of the pseudonym.  But of the hypothesis of such a choice of a
+pseudonym, enough has been said.  Whatever happened, whatever the Earl
+knew, if it were discreditable to be dedicated to by an actor,
+Southampton was discredited; for we are to prove that all in the world of
+letters and theatre who have left any notice of Shakespeare identified
+the actor with the poet.
+
+This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair.  But,
+says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or “patronage” of Southampton “not a
+scrap of evidence exists.” {109a}  Where would Mr. Greenwood expect to
+find a scrap of evidence?  In literary anecdote?  Of contemporary
+literary anecdote about Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman,
+Heywood, and Fletcher, there is none, or next to none.  There is the
+tradition that Southampton gave the poet £1000 towards a purchase to
+which he had a mind.  (Rowe seems to have got this from Davenant,—through
+Betterton.)  In what documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of
+evidence?  Perhaps in Southampton’s book of his expenditure, and that
+does not exist.  It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find him,
+poor as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+
+As to the chances of an actor’s knowing “smart people,” Heywood, who knew
+all that world, tells us {109b} that “Tarleton, in his time, was gracious
+with the Queen, his sovereign,” Queen Elizabeth.  “Will Kempe was in the
+favour of his sovereign.”
+
+_They_ had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians.  I
+am not pretending that, though his
+
+       “flights upon the banks of Thames
+    So did take Eliza and our James,”
+
+Will Shakspere “was gracious with the Queen.”
+
+We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players
+address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.  They have the audacity to
+say nothing about having asked and received permission to dedicate.  They
+say that the Earls “have prosecuted both the plays and their authour
+living” (while in life) “with much favour.”  They “have collected and
+published the works of ‘the dead’ . . . only to keep alive the memory of
+so worthy a Friend, and Fellow” (associate) “as was our Shakespeare,
+‘your servant Shakespeare.’”
+
+Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor’s authorship
+of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls held him.  Mr.
+Greenwood {110a} supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains
+an allusion to a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny.  Be
+that as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke
+and Montgomery.  To _them_ it cannot lie; _they_ know whether they
+patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or not, that the
+plays were their “servant’s.”  How is Mr. Greenwood to overcome this
+certain testimony of the Actors, to the identity of their late “Fellow”
+the player, with the author; and to the patronage which the Earls
+bestowed on him and his compositions?  Mr. Greenwood says nothing except
+that we may reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which
+the players signed. {111a}
+
+Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare, the
+dedication does not say in so many words.  They had seen his plays and
+had “favoured” both him and them, with so much favour, had “used
+indulgence” to the author.  That is not nearly explicit enough for the
+precise Baconians.  But the Earls knew whether what was said were true or
+false.  I am not sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been
+duped as to the authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the
+great Baconian joke and mystery—that “William Shakespeare” the author is
+not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written in
+legal documents as “William Shakespeare.”
+
+Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere was
+acting in a company (1592–3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote _Venus and
+Adonis_, and, signing “W. Shakspeare,” dedicated it to his young friend,
+the Earl, promising to add “some graver labour,” a promise fulfilled in
+_Lucrece_.  In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the
+affairs of a young and beautiful Earl—the Earl of Essex, not of
+Southampton: to Essex he did not dedicate his two poems (if _Venus_ and
+_Lucrece_ were his).  He “did nothing but ruminate” (he tells the world)
+on Essex.  How Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown was occupied in 1593–4, of course
+we cannot possibly be aware.
+
+I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much
+schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in
+London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be
+the rising player-author alluded to as “Shakescene.”  There remains a
+difficulty.  By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of _thirteen_ plays,
+or even of six.  But I have not credited him with the authorship,
+between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, _Hamlet_, _Romeo
+and Juliet_, _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Titus Andronicus_, _Comedy of
+Errors_, _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _King John_, the three plays of _Henry
+VI_, and _The Taming of the Shrew_.  Mr. Greenwood {112a} cites Judge
+Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of 1592 “some
+half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,” and for Dr.
+Furnivall’s opinion that eleven had been composed.
+
+If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we
+have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I should
+be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed, in these
+five years, by Will.  Mr. Greenwood writes, “Some of the dates are
+disputable”; and, for himself, would omit “_Titus Andronicus_, the three
+plays of _Henry VI_, and possibly also _The Taming of the Shrew_, while
+the reference to _Hamlet_ also is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very
+doubtful force.” {113a}  This leaves us with six of Dr. Furnivall’s list
+of earliest plays put out of action.  The miracle is decomposing, but
+plays numerous enough to stagger my credulity remain.
+
+I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592–3 was
+the ex-butcher’s boy.  Meanwhile these five plays, written by somebody
+before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr. Greenwood’s book
+{113b} with Dr. Furnivall’s eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he
+be a “Stratfordian.”  “Will, even Will,” says the Stratfordian, “could
+not have composed the five, much less the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin
+Reed’s thirteen ‘before 1592.’” {113c}  But, at the close of his work
+{113d} Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen
+Shakespearean plays “before 1592” as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian of
+whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of _feu_ Mr. Bludyer of _The
+Tomahawk_.
+
+From the five plays left to Shakespeare’s account in p. 51, _King John_
+(as we know it) is now eliminated.  “I find it impossible to believe that
+the same man was the author of the drama” (_The Troublesome Reign of King
+John_) “published in 1591, and that which, so far as we know, first saw
+the light in the Folio of 1623 . . .  Hardly a single line of the
+original version reappears in the _King John_ of Shakespeare.” {114a}  “I
+think it is a mistake to endeavour to fortify the argument against him”
+(my Will, _toi que j’aime_), “by ascribing to Shakespeare such old plays
+as the _King John_ of 1591 or the primitive _Hamlet_.” {114b}
+
+I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw _King John_ apparently still
+“coloured on the card” among “Shakespeare’s lot.”  We are now left with
+_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Comedy of Errors_,
+and _Romeo and Juliet_, out of Dr. Furnivall’s list of plays up to 1593.
+The phantom force of miraculously early plays is “following darkness like
+a dream.”  We do not know the date of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, we do
+not know the date of _Romeo and Juliet_.  Mr. Gollancz dates the former
+“about 1592,” and the latter “at 1591.” {114c}  This is a mere personal
+speculation.  Of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, we only know that our version is
+one “corrected and augmented” by William Shakespeare in 1598.  I dare say
+it is as early as 1591–2, in its older form.  Of _The Comedy of Errors_,
+Mr. Collins wrote, “It is all but certain that it was written between
+1589 and 1592, and it is quite certain that it was written before the end
+of 1594.” {114d}
+
+The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished.  The
+miracle is very considerably abated.  In place of introducing the airy
+hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps, more
+instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare’s
+earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591–3.
+There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be
+credited by Stratfordians to Will.  But even so, we have sufficient to
+“give us pause,” says Mr. Greenwood, with justice.  It gives _me_
+“pause,” if I am to believe that, between 1587 and 1592, Will wrote
+_Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _A Midsummer Night’s
+Dream_, and _Romeo and Juliet_.  There is a limit even to my gullibility,
+and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now possess them, before 1593,
+I do not suppose that Will was the man.  But the dates, in fact, are
+unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST”
+
+
+WE now come to consider another “miracle” discovered in the plays,—a
+miracle if the actor be the author.  The new portent is the courtliness
+and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the coarsest
+jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen and ladies in the
+plays.  To be sure the refinement in the jests is often conspicuously
+absent.  How could the rude actor learn his quips and pretty phrases, and
+farfetched conceits?  This question I have tried to answer already,—the
+whole of these fashions abound in the literature of the day.
+
+Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the
+ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse, whether
+in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he himself
+frequented their society.  Marlowe did not frequent the best society;
+_he_ was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in the speeches
+of the great and noble in _Edward II_.  Courtiers and kings never did
+speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in blank verse.  The style
+is a poetical convention, while the quips and conceits, the airs and
+graces, ran riot through the literature of the age of Lyly and his
+_Euphues_ and his comedies, the age of the _Arcadia_.
+
+A cheap and probable source of Will’s courtliness is to be found in the
+courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately printed
+between 1584 and 1592.  Lyly’s “real significance is that he was the
+first to bring together on the English stage the elements of high comedy,
+thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare’s _Much Ado about Nothing_ and
+_As You Like It_” (and _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, one may add).  “Whoever
+knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly miss the many
+evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly’s plays almost as closely as
+Lyly had read Pliny’s _Natural History_. . . .  One could hardly imagine
+_Love’s Labour’s Lost_ as existent in the period from 1590 to 1600, had
+not Lyly’s work just preceded it.” {120a}
+
+“It is to Lyly’s plays,” writes Dr. Landmann, “that Shakespeare owes so
+much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness of expression, and
+especially in that predilection for witticisms, quibbles, and playing
+upon words which he shows in his comedies as well as in his tragedies.”
+There follows a dissertation on the affected styles of Guevara and
+Gongora, of the _Pléiade_ in France, and generally of the artificial
+manner in Europe, till in England we reach Lyly, “in whose comedies,”
+says Dr. Furness, “I think we should look for motives which appeared
+later in Shakespeare.” {121a}
+
+The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and court
+plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature than at
+Court, decide that the poet of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_ was not Will, but
+the courtly “concealed poet.”  No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R.
+M. Theobald {121b} that “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” and, by parity of
+reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly,
+pouring into Lyly’s comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits of
+his own courtly youth.  “What for no?”  The hypothesis is as good as the
+other hypotheses, “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” “Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”
+
+The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the
+well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and are
+noted even in short educational histories of English literature.
+Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls, to
+read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly’s plays, and read the poems of
+the time.  I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet.  It was not
+hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to catch the manner
+of Lyly’s Court comedies, and “Marlowe’s mighty line” (Marlowe was not
+“brought up on the knees of Marchionesses”!), but to improve on them.
+People did not commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people
+did not write in the poetic convention.  Certainly Queen Mary and Queen
+Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule (we have abundance of their
+letters), like women of this world.  There is a curious exception in
+Letter VIII of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell.  In this (we
+have a copy of the original French), Mary plunges into the affected and
+figured style already practised by _Les Précieuses_ of her day; and
+expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon.  If courtiers of both
+sexes conversed in the style of _Euphues_ (which is improbable), they
+learned the trick of it from _Euphues_; not the author of _Euphues_ from
+them.  Lyly’s most popular prose was accessible to Shakespeare.  The
+whole convention as to how the great should speak and bear themselves was
+accessible in poetry and the drama.  A man of genius naturally made his
+ladies and courtiers more witty, more “conceited,” more eloquent, more
+gracious than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.
+
+It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts so
+obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon, intimately
+familiar with the society of the great, could make the great speak as, in
+the plays, they do—and as in real life they probably did _not_!
+
+We now look at _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, published in quarto, in 1598, as
+“corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.”  The date of composition is
+unknown, but the many varieties of versification, with some allusions,
+mark it as among the earliest of the dramas.  Supposing that Shakespeare
+obtained his knowledge of fine manners and speech, and of the tedious
+quips and conceits which he satirises, from the contemporary poems,
+plays, and novels which abounded in them, and from _précieux_ and
+_précieuses_ who imitated them, as I suggest, even then _Love’s Labour’s
+Lost_ is an extremely eccentric piece.  I cannot imagine how a man who
+knew the foreign politics of his age as Bacon did, could have dreamed of
+writing anything so eccentric, that is, if it has any connection with
+foreign politics of the time.
+
+The scene is the Court of _Ferdinand_, King of Navarre.  In 1589–93, the
+eyes of England were fixed on the Court of her ally, _Henri_ of Navarre,
+in his struggle with the League and the Guises; the War of Religion.  But
+the poet calls the King “Ferdinand,” taking perhaps from some story this
+non-existent son of Charles III of Navarre (died 1425): to whom,
+according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian chronicler of that time, the
+French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold.  This is a transaction of the
+early fifteenth century, and leads to the presence of the princess of
+France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre in the play; the whole thing
+is quite unhistorical, and has the air of being borrowed from some lost
+story or brief novel.  Bacon’s brother, Anthony, was English minister at
+the Court of Navarre.  What could tempt Bacon to pick out a
+non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre, plant him in the distant days
+of Jeanne d’Arc, and make him, at that period, found an Academe for three
+years of austere study and absence of women?  But, if Bacon did this,
+what could induce him to give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as
+companions, the Maréchal de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in
+1589–93, the chief adherents of Henri of Navarre), and add to them
+“Dumain,” that is, the Duc de Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes
+of Henri and of the Huguenots?  Even in the unhistorically minded
+Shakespeare, the freak is of the most eccentric,—but in Bacon this
+friskiness is indeed strange.  I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, {124a} find
+any “allusions to the Civil War of France.”  France and Navarre, in the
+play, are in full peace.
+
+The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about
+1430.  By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne, and
+Bankes’s celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the date to 1591.
+But the Navarre of the play is a region “out of space, out of time,” a
+fairy world of projected Academes (like that of the four young men in de
+la Primaudaye’s _L’Académie Française_, Englished in 1586) and of peace,
+while the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was engaged in a struggle for
+life and faith; and in his ceaseless amours.
+
+Many of Shakespeare’s anachronisms are easily intelligible.  He takes a
+novel or story about any remote period, or he chooses, as for the
+_Midsummer Night’s Dream_, a period earlier than that of the Trojan war.
+He gives to the Athens contemporary with the “Late Minoan III” period
+(1600 B.C.?) a Duke, and his personages live like English nobles and
+rustics of his own day, among the fairies of English folk-lore.  It is
+the manner of Chaucer and of the poets and painters of any age before the
+end of the eighteenth century.  The resulting anachronisms are natural
+and intelligible.  We do not expect war-chariots in _Troilus and
+Cressida_; it is when the author makes the bronze-clad Achæans familiar
+with Plato and Aristotle that we are surprised.  In _Love’s Labour’s
+Lost_ we do not expect the author to introduce the manners of the early
+fifteenth century, the date of the affair of the 200,000 ducats.  Let the
+play reflect the men and manners of 1589–93,—but why place Mayenne, a
+fanatical Catholic foe of Navarre, among the courtiers of the Huguenot
+King of Navarre?
+
+As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day Dumain)
+appearing as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri, Bacon, of all men,
+could not have made that absurd error.  It was Shakespeare who took but
+an absent-minded interest in foreign politics.  If Bacon is building his
+play on an affair, the ducats, of 1425–35 (roughly speaking), he should
+not bring in a performing horse, trained by Bankes, a Staffordshire man,
+which was performing its tricks at Shrewsbury—in 1591. {126a}  Thus early
+we find that great scholar mixing up chronology in a way which, in
+Shakespeare even, surprises; but, in Bacon, seems quite out of keeping.
+
+Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as “Dumain,”—Mayenne,
+“whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French
+affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led
+to number him also among his supporters.”  Bacon would not have been so
+led!  As Mayenne and Henri fought against each other at Ivry, in 1590,
+this was carrying nonsense far, even for Will, but for the earnestly
+instructive Bacon!
+
+“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 Ambassador to France,” I cannot conjecture.  _There are
+no French politics in the piece_, any more than there are “mysteries of
+fashionable life,” such as Bacon might have heard of from Essex 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 passage 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.  Molière certainly
+corrected and augmented and transfigured, in his illustrious 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 fashionable 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 embassy 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 embassy 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 fashionable 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 Ambassador 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 sex!
+
+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 assurance: and the Baconians
+repeat them in their little books of popularisation and propaganda.
+_Quantula sapientia_!
+
+
+
+
+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 manuscript 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
+assumed 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 authorship.  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 Warwickshire
+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 identity 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 identity 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
+authorship 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.
+
+Destitute 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 Passionate 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 Passionate 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 authorship 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 Warwickshire man cannot be the author.”
+
+“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 circumstances: 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 bumbast 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 ingratitude, 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 assailed 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 circumstances, as cruelly forsake
+his friends; “yes, for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a
+dangerous rival, in their own fellowship.  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 bumbast 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
+circumstances 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 assuming the validity of the
+surmise that there is an allusion to Shakspere, {143a} “the utmost that
+we should be entitled 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 entitled to say,” is, in my opinion, what
+we have no shadow of a title 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 bumbast 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 entitled 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.  Nobody 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 Parnassus_ (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” the
+University wits “and Ben Jonson too.”  The date is not earlier than that
+of Ben’s satiric play on the poets, _The Poetaster_ (1601), to which
+reference is made.  Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant,
+his opinion of Shakespeare’s pre-eminent merit only proves, as in the
+case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the excellences of
+Shakespeare.  In him they saw no scholar.
+
+The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor and author.
+
+All this “is quite consistent with the theory that Shake-speare was a
+pseudonym,” {147a} says Mr. Greenwood.  Of course it is, but it is _not_
+consistent with the theory that Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless
+rustic, for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an
+hour.  Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if you will, that _he_
+thought that _Kempe_ thought, that his fellow player was the author.  But
+we have better evidence of what the actors thought than in the Cambridge
+play.
+
+In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in _Palladis Tamia_ credits Shakespeare
+with _Venus and Adonis_, with privately circulated sonnets, and with a
+number of the comedies and tragedies.  How the allusions “negative the
+hypothesis that Shakespeare was a _nom de plume_ is not apparent,” says
+Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method.  I repeat that he wanders
+from the point, which is, here, that the only William Shak(&c.) known to
+us at the time, in London, was credited with the plays and poems on all
+sides, which proves that no incompatibility between the man and the works
+was recognised.
+
+Then Weaver (1599) alludes to him as author of _Venus_, _Lucrece_,
+_Romeo_, _Richard_, “more whose names I know not.”  Davies (1610) calls
+him “our English Terence” (the famous comedian), and mentions him as
+having “played some Kingly parts in sport.”  Freeman (1614) credits him
+with _Venus_ and _Lucrece_.  “Besides in plays thy wit winds like
+Meander.”  I repeat Heywood’s evidence.  Thomas Heywood, author of that
+remarkable domestic play, _A Woman Killed with Kindness_, was, from the
+old days of Henslowe, in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and an actor;
+he survived into the reign of Charles I.  Writing on the familiar names
+of the poets, “Jack Fletcher,” “Frank Beaumont,” “Kit Marlowe,” “Tom
+Nash,” he says,
+
+    “Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill
+    Commanded mirth and passion, was but ‘Will.’”
+
+Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author?  No quibbles serve
+against the evidence.
+
+We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare’s death, or
+invoke, at present, Ben Jonson’s panegyric of 1623.  As to Davies, his
+dull and obscure epigram is addressed “To our English Terence, Mr. Will
+Shake-speare.”  He accosts Shakespeare as “Good Will.”  He remarks that,
+“as some say,” if Will “had not played some Kingly parts in sport,” he
+had been “a companion for a _King_,” and “been a King among the meaner
+sort.”  Nobody, now, can see the allusion and the joke.  Shakespeare’s
+company, in 1604, acted a play on the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600.  King
+James suppressed the play after the second night, as, of course, he was
+brought on the stage throughout the action: and in very droll and
+dreadful situations.  Did Will take the King’s part, and annoy gentle
+King Jamie, “as some say”?  Nobody knows.  But Mr. Greenwood, to disable
+Davies’s recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, “Our English Terence,”
+quotes, from Florio’s _Montaigne_, a silly old piece of Roman literary
+gossip, Terence’s plays were written by Scipio and Laelius.  In fact,
+Terence alludes in his prologue to the _Adelphi_, to a spiteful report
+that he was aided by great persons.  The prologue may be the source of
+the fable—that does not matter.  Davies might get the fable in Montaigne,
+and, knowing that some Great One wrote Will’s plays, might therefore, in
+irony, address him as “Our English Terence.”  This is a pretty free
+conjecture!  In Roman comedy he had only two names known to him to choose
+from; he took Terence, not Plautus.  But if Davies was in the great
+Secret, a world of others must have shared _le Secret de Polichinelle_.
+Yet none hints at it, and only a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a
+straw as the off-chance that Davies _knew_, and used “Terence” as a gibe.
+{149a}
+
+The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor wrote
+the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so, and
+therefore that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to demonstrate that
+he was incapable of the poetry and the knowledge displayed in his works.
+Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when
+he makes Will incapable of writing.  Such a Will could deceive no mortal.
+{150a}  But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays
+“much learning, and remarkable classical attainments,” or “a wide
+familiarity with the classics,” {150b} suppose that his absolutely
+bookless Will could have persuaded his intimates that he was the author
+of plays exhibiting “a wide familiarity with the classics,” or
+“remarkable classical attainments.”  The thing is wholly impossible.
+
+I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to Shakespeare
+speaks of him as “learned,” erudite, scholarly, and so forth.  The
+epithets for him are “sweet,” “gentle,” “honeyed,” “sugared,”
+“honey-tongued”—this is the convention.  The tradition followed by
+Milton, who was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote
+_L’Allegro_ just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare “sweetest
+Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,” with “native wood-notes wild”; and gives to
+Jonson “the _learned_ sock.”  Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years
+before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608.  Like Milton he was a
+Cambridge man.  The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works appeared when each
+of these two bookish men was aged fifteen.  It would necessarily revive
+interest in Shakespeare, now first known as far as about half of his
+plays went: he would be discussed among lovers of literature at
+Cambridge.  Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller’s remark that Shakespeare’s
+“learning was very little,” that, if alive, he would confess himself “to
+be never any scholar.” {151a}  I cannot grant that Fuller is dividing the
+persons of actor and author.  Men of Shakespeare’s generation, such as
+Jonson, did not think him learned; nor did men of the next generation.
+If Mr. Collins’s view be correct, the men of Shakespeare’s and of
+Milton’s generations were too ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was
+deeply learned in the literature of Rome, and in the literature of
+Greece.  Every one was too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+“THE SILENCE OF PHILIP HENSLOWE”
+
+
+WHEN Shakespeare is mentioned as an author by contemporary writers, the
+Baconian stratagem, we have seen, is to cry, “Ah, but you cannot prove
+the author mentioned to be the actor.”  We have seen that Meres (1598)
+speaks of Shakespeare as the leading tragic and comic poet (“Poor
+poet-ape that would be thought our chief,” quoth Jonson), as author of
+_Venus and Adonis_, and as a sonneteer.  “All this does nothing whatever
+to support the idea that the Stratford player was the author of the plays
+and poems alluded to,” says Mr. Greenwood, playing that card again.
+{155a}
+
+The allusions, I repeat, _do_ prove that Shak(&c.), the actor, was
+believed to be the author, till any other noted William Shak(&c.) is
+found to have been conspicuously before the town.  “There is nothing at
+all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal
+knowledge of Shakespeare.”  There is nothing at all to prove that Meres,
+native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge of nine-tenths of the
+English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he mentions.  “On the
+question—who was Shakespeare?—he throws no light.”  He “throws no light
+on the question” “who was?” any of the poets mentioned by him, except
+one, quite forgotten, whose College he names . . . To myself this “sad
+repeated air,”—“critics who praise Shakespeare do not say _who
+Shakespeare_ was,”—would appear to be, not an argument, but a subterfuge:
+though Mr. Greenwood honestly believes it to be an argument,—otherwise he
+would not use it: much less would he repeat it with frequent iteration.
+The more a man was notorious, as was Will Shakspere the actor, the less
+the need for any critic to tell his public “who Shakespeare was.”
+
+As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when Shakespeare is
+alluded to as an author, so he tries to better his case when, in the
+account-book of Philip Henslowe, an owner of theatres, money-lender,
+pawn-broker, purchaser of plays from authors, and so forth, Shakespeare
+is _not_ mentioned at all.  Here is a mystery which, properly handled,
+may advance the great cause.  Henslowe has notes of loans of money to
+several actors, some of them of Shakespeare’s company, “The Lord
+Chamberlain’s.”  There is no such note of a loan to Shakespeare.  Does
+this prove that he was not an actor?  If so, Burbage was not an actor;
+Henslowe never names him.
+
+There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after each performance
+of any play in one of his theatres.  In these notes _the name of
+Shakespeare __is never once mentioned as the author of any play_.  How
+weird!  But in _these_ notes the names of the authors of the plays acted
+are never mentioned.  Does this suggest that Bacon wrote all these plays?
+
+On the other hand, there are frequent mentions of advances of money to
+authors who were working at plays for Henslowe, singly, or in pairs,
+threes, fours, or fives.  We find Drayton, Dekker, Chapman, and nine
+authors now forgotten by all but antiquarians.  We have also Ben Jonson
+(1597), Marston, Munday, Middleton, Webster, and others, authors in
+Henslowe’s pay.  _But the same of Shakespeare never appears_.
+Mysterious!  The other men’s names, writes Dr. Furness, occur “because
+they were all writers for Henslowe’s theatre, but we must wait at all
+events for the discovery of some other similar record, before we can
+produce corresponding memoranda regarding Shaksper” (_sic_) “and his
+productions.” {157a}
+
+The natural mind of the ordinary man explains all by saying, “Henslowe
+records no loans of money to Shakspere the actor, because he lent him no
+money.  He records no payments for plays to Shakespeare the author-actor,
+because to Henslowe the actor sold no plays.”  That is the whole
+explanation of the Silence of Philip Henslowe.  If Shakspere did sell a
+play to Henslowe, why should that financier omit the fact from his
+accounts?  Suppose that the actor was illiterate as Baconians fervently
+believe, and sold Bacon’s plays, what prevented him from selling a play
+of Bacon’s (under his own name, as usual) to Henslowe?  To obtain a
+Baconian reply you must wander into conjecture, and imagine that Bacon
+forbade the transaction.  Then _why_ did he forbid it?  Because he could
+get a better price from Shakspere’s company?  The same cause would
+produce the same effect on Shakspere himself; whether he were the author,
+or were Bacon’s, or any man’s go-between.  On any score but that of
+money, why was Henslowe good enough for Ben Jonson, Dekker, Heywood,
+Middleton, and Webster, and not good enough for Bacon, who did not appear
+in the matter at all, but was represented in it by the actor, Will?  As a
+gentleman and a man of the Court, Bacon would be as much discredited if
+he were known to sell (for £6 on an average) his noble works to the Lord
+Chamberlain’s Company, as if he sold them to Henslowe.
+
+I know not whether the great lawyer, courtier, scholar, and philosopher
+is supposed by Baconians to have given Will Shakspere a commission on his
+sales of plays; or to have let him keep the whole sum in each case.  I
+know not whether the players paid Shakspere a sum down for his (or
+Bacon’s) plays, or whether Will received a double share, or other, or any
+share of the profits on them, as Henslowe did when he let a house to the
+players.  Nobody knows any of these things.
+
+“If Shakspere the player had been a dramatist, surely Henslowe would have
+employed him also, like the others, in that behalf.” {159a}  Henslowe
+would, if he could have got the “copy” cheap enough.  Was any one of “the
+others,” the playwrights, a player, holding a share in his company?  If
+not, the fact makes an essential difference, for Shakspere _was_ a
+shareholder.  Collier, in his preface to Henslowe’s so-called “Diary,”
+mentions a playwright who was bound to scribble for Henslowe only (Henry
+Porter), and another, Chettle, who was bound to write only for the
+company protected by the Earl of Nottingham. {159b}  Modern publishers
+and managers sometimes make the same terms with novelists and
+playwrights.
+
+It appears to me that Shakspere’s company would be likely, as his plays
+were very popular, to make the same sort of agreement with him, and to
+give him such terms as he would be glad to accept,—whether the wares were
+his own—or Bacon’s.  He was a keen man of business.  In such a case, he
+would not write for Henslowe’s pittance.  He had a better market.  The
+plays, whether written by himself, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, were
+at his disposal, and he did not dispose of them to Henslowe, wherefore
+Henslowe cannot mention him in his accounts.  That is all.
+
+Quoting an American Judge (Dr. Stotsenburg, apparently), Mr. Greenwood
+cites the circumstance that, in two volumes of Alleyn’s papers “there is
+not one mention of such a poet as William Shaksper in his list of actors,
+poets, and theatrical comrades.” {160a}  If this means that Shakspere is
+not mentioned by Alleyn among actors, are we to infer that William was
+not an actor?  Even Baconians insist that he was an actor.  “How strange,
+how more than strange,” cries Mr. Greenwood, “that Henslowe should make
+no mention in all this long diary, embracing all the time from 1591 to
+1609, of the actor-author . . . No matter.  _Credo quia impossibile_!”
+{160b}  _Credo_ what? and what is _impossible_?  Henslowe’s volume is no
+Diary; he does not tell a single anecdote of any description; he merely
+enters loans, gains, payments.  Does Henslowe mention, say, Ben Jonson,
+_when he is not doing business with Ben_?  Does he mention any actor or
+author except in connection with money matters?  Then, if he did no
+business with Shakspere the actor, in borrowing or lending, and did no
+business with Shakespeare the author, in borrowing, lending, buying or
+selling, “How strange, how more than strange” it would be if Henslowe
+_did_ mention Shakespeare!  He was not keeping a journal of literary and
+dramatic jottings.  He was keeping an account of his expenses and
+receipts.  He never names Richard Burbage any more than he mentions
+Shakespeare.
+
+Mr. Greenwood again expresses his views about this dark suspicious
+mystery, the absence of Shakespeare or Shakspere (or Shak, as you like
+it), from Henslowe’s accounts, if Shak(&c.) wrote plays.  But the
+mystery, if mystery there be, is just as obscure if the actor were the
+channel through which Bacon’s plays reached the stage, for the pretended
+author of these masterpieces.  Shak—was not the man to do all the
+troking, bargaining, lying, going here and there, and making himself a
+motley to the view for £0, 0_s._ 0_d._  If he were a sham, a figure-head,
+a liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts, _he would be paid for it_.
+But he did not deal with Henslowe in his bargainings, and _that_ is why
+Henslowe does not mention him.  Mr. Greenwood, in one place, {161a}
+agrees, so far, with me.  “Why did Henslowe not mention Shakespeare as
+the writer of other plays” (than _Titus Andronicus_ and _Henry VI_)?  “I
+think the answer is simple enough.”  (So do I.)  “Neither Shakspere nor
+‘Shakespeare’ ever wrote for Henslowe!”  The obvious is perceived at
+last; and the reason given is “that he was above Henslowe’s ‘skyline,’”
+“he” being the Author.  We only differ as to _why_ the author was above
+Henslowe’s “sky-line.”  I say, because good Will had a better market,
+that of his Company.  I understand Mr. Greenwood to think,—because the
+Great Unknown was too great a man to deal with Henslowe.  If to write for
+the stage were discreditable, to deal (unknown) with Henslowe was no more
+disgraceful than to deal with “a cry of players”; and as (unknown) Will
+did the bargaining, the Great Unknown was as safe with Will in one case
+as in the other.  If Will did not receive anything for the plays from his
+own company (who firmly believed in his authorship), they must have said,
+“Will! dost thou serve the Muses and thy obliged fellows for naught?
+Dost thou give us two popular plays yearly,—gratis?”
+
+Do you not see that, in the interests of the Great Secret itself, Will
+_had_ to take the pay for the plays (pretended his) from somebody.  Will
+Shakspere making his dear fellows and friends a present of two
+masterpieces yearly was too incredible.  So I suppose he did have
+royalties on the receipts, or otherwise got his money; and, as he
+certainly did not get them from Henslowe, Henslowe had no conceivable
+reason for entering Will’s name in his accounts.
+
+Such are the reflections of a plain man, but to an imaginative soul there
+seems to be a brooding mist, with a heart of fire, which half conceals
+and half reveals the darkened chamber wherein abides “The Silence of
+Philip Henslowe.”  “The Silence of Philip Henslowe,” Mr. Greenwood
+writes, “is a very remarkable phenomenon . . . ”  It is a phenomenon
+precisely as remarkable as the absence of Mr. Greenwood’s name from the
+accounts of a boot-maker with whom he has never had any dealings.
+
+“If, however, there was a man in high position, ‘a concealed poet,’” who
+“took the works of others and rewrote and transformed them, besides
+bringing out original plays of his own . . . then it is natural enough
+that his name should not appear among those [of the] for the most part
+impecunious dramatists to whom Henslowe paid money for playwriting.”
+{163a}  Nothing can be more natural, and, in fact, the name of Bacon, or
+Southampton, or James VI, or Sir John Ramsay, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or
+Sir Fulke Greville, or any other “man in high position,” does _not_
+appear in Henslowe’s accounts.  Nor does the name of William Shak(&c.).
+But why should it not appear if Will sold either his own plays, or those
+of the noble friend to whom he lent his name and personality—to Henslowe?
+Why not?
+
+Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great “concealed
+poet” “of high position,” who can “bring out original plays of his own,”
+and yet “takes the works of others,” say of “sporting Kyd,” or of Dekker
+and Chettle, and such poor devils,—_takes_ them as a Yankee
+pirate-publisher takes my rhymes,—and “rewrites and transforms them.”
+
+Bacon (or Bungay) _cannot_ “take” them without permission of their legal
+owners,—Shakspere’s or any other company;—of any one, in short, who, as
+Ben Jonson says, “buys up reversions of old plays.”  How is he to manage
+these shabby dealings?  Apparently he employs Will Shakspere, spells his
+own “_nom de plume_” “Shakespeare,” and has his rewritings and
+transformations of the destitute author’s work acted by Will’s company.
+What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke Greville, or James VI, or any
+“man in high position” whom fancy can suggest!  The plays by the original
+authors, whoever they were, could only be obtained by the “concealed
+poet” and “man in high position” from the legal owners, Shakspere’s
+company, usually.  The concealed poet had to negotiate with the owners,
+and Bacon (or whoever he was) employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first,
+I think, to extract the plays from the owners, and then to pretend that
+he himself, even Will, had “rewritten and transformed them.”
+
+What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it was
+that Will would blackmail the “man in high position”!  “Doubtless” he
+did: we find Bacon arrested for debt, more than once, while Will buys New
+Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted from the concealed poet of
+high position. {164a}  Bacon did associate with that serpent Phillips, a
+reptile of Walsingham, who forged a postscript to Mary Stuart’s letter to
+Babington.  But now, if not Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high
+position, with a mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays
+by sad, needy authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the
+Warwickshire poacher and ignorant butcher’s boy, country schoolmaster,
+draper’s apprentice, _enfin_, _tout le tremblement_.
+
+“How strange, how more than strange!”
+
+The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March 3,
+1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the performances
+of many plays.  He was paid as owner or lessee of the House used by this
+or that company.  On March 3, 1591, the play acted by “Lord Strange’s
+(Derby’s) men” was _Henry VI_.  Several other plays with names familiar
+in Shakespeare’s Works, such as _Titus Andronicus_, all the three parts
+of _Henry VI_, _King Leare_ (April 6, 1593), _Henry V_ (May 14, 1592),
+_The Taming of a Shrew_ (June 11, 1594), and _Hamlet_, paid toll to
+Henslowe.  He “received” so much, on each occasion, when they were acted
+in a theatre of his.  But he never records his purchase of these plays;
+and it is not generally believed that Shakespeare was the author of all
+these plays, in the form which they bore in 1591–4: though there is much
+difference of opinion.
+
+There is one rather interesting case.  On August 25, 1594, Henslowe
+enters “_ne_” (that is, “a new play”) “Received at the Venesyon Comodey,
+eighteen pence.”  That was his share of the receipts.  The Lord
+Chamberlain’s Company, that of Shakespeare, was playing in Henslowe’s
+theatre at Newington Butts.  If the “Venesyon Comodey” (Venetian Comedy)
+were _The Merchant of Venice_, this is the first mention of it.  But
+nobody knows what Henslowe meant by “the Venesyon Comodey.”  He does not
+mention the author’s name, because, in this part of his accounts he never
+does mention the author or authors.  He only names them when he buys
+from, or lends to, or has other money dealings with the authors.  He had
+none with Shakespeare, hence the Silence of Philip Henslowe.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE—HIS MONUMENT AND PORTRAITS
+
+
+IN the chapter on the Preoccupations of Bacon the reader may find help in
+making up his mind as to whether Bacon, with his many and onerous duties
+and occupations, his scientific studies, and his absorbing scientific
+preoccupation, is a probable author of the Shakespearean plays.  Mr.
+Greenwood finds the young Shakspere impossible—because of his
+ignorance—which made him such a really good pseudo-author, and such a
+successful mask for Bacon, or Bacon’s unknown equivalent.  The Shakspere
+of later life, the well-to-do Shakspere, the purchaser of the right to
+bear arms; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager a creditor; a
+would-be encloser of a common; a man totally bookless, is, to Mr.
+Greenwood’s mind, an impossible author of the later plays.
+
+Here, first, are moral objections on the ground of character as revealed
+in some legal documents concerning business.  Now, I am very ready to
+confess that William’s dealings with his debtors, and with one creditor,
+are wholly unlike what I should expect from the author of the plays.
+Moreover, the conduct of Shelley in regard to his wife was, in my
+opinion, very mean and cruel, and the last thing that we could have
+expected from one who, in verse, was such a tender philanthropist, and in
+life was—women apart—the best-hearted of men.  The conduct of Robert
+Burns, alas, too often disappoints the lover of his _Cottar’s Saturday
+Night_ and other moral pieces.  He was an inconsistent walker.
+
+I sincerely wish that Shakespeare had been less hard in money matters,
+just as I wish that in financial matters Scott had been more like
+himself, that he had not done the last things that we should have
+expected him to do.  As a member of the Scottish Bar it was inconsistent
+with his honour to be the secret proprietor of a publishing and a
+printing business.  This is the unexplained moral paradox in the career
+of a man of chivalrous honour and strict probity: but the fault did not
+prevent Scott from writing his novels and poems.  Why, then, should the
+few bare records of Shakspere’s monetary transactions make _his_
+authorship impossible?  The objection seems weakly sentimental.
+
+Macaulay scolds Scott as fiercely as Mr. Greenwood scolds Shakspere,—for
+the more part, ignorantly and unjustly.  Still, there is matter to cause
+surprise and regret.  Both Scott and Shakspere are accused of writing for
+gain, and of spending money on lands and houses with the desire to found
+families.  But in the mysterious mixture of each human personality, any
+sober soul who reflects on his own sins and failings will not think other
+men’s failings incompatible with intellectual excellence.  Bacon’s own
+conduct in money matters was that of a man equally grasping and
+extravagant.  Ben Jonson thus describes Shakespeare as a social
+character: “He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature . . . I
+loved the man and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as
+any.”  Perhaps Ben never owed money to Shakspere and refused to pay!
+
+We must not judge a man’s whole intellectual character, and declare him
+to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about
+matters of business.  Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr.
+Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the
+ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,—pursued by the distraint of
+one of the friendly family of Quiney—Adrian Quiney.  They were neighbours
+and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. {171a}  I do not, like Mr.
+Greenwood, see anything “at all out of the way” in the circumstance “that
+a man should be writing _Hamlet_, and at the same time bringing actions
+for petty sums lent on loan at some unspecified interest.” {171b}  Nor do
+I see anything at all out of the way in Bacon’s prosecution of his friend
+and benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing _Hamlet_.  Indeed,
+Shakspere’s case is the less “out of the way” of the two.  He wanted his
+loan to be repaid, and told his lawyer to bring an action.  Bacon wanted
+to keep his head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or to keep his
+body out of the Tower; or he merely, as he declares, wanted to do his
+duty as a lawyer of the Crown.  In any case, Bacon was in a tragic
+position almost unexampled; and was at once overwhelmed by work, and, one
+must suppose, by acute distress of mind, in the case of Essex.  He must
+have felt this the more keenly, if, as some Baconians vow, _he wrote the
+Sonnets to Essex_.  Whether he were writing his _Hamlet_ when engaged in
+Essex’s case (1601), or any other of his dramatic masterpieces, even this
+astonishing man must have been sorely bestead to combine so many branches
+of business.
+
+Thus I would reply to Mr. Greenwood’s amazement that Shakspere, a hard
+creditor, and so forth, should none the less have been able to write his
+plays.  But if it is meant that a few business transactions must have
+absorbed the whole consciousness of Shakespeare, and left him neither
+time nor inclination for poetry, consider the scientific preoccupation of
+Bacon, his parliamentary duties, his ceaseless activity as “one of the
+legal body-guard of the Queen” at a time when he had often to be
+examining persons accused of conspiracy,—and do not forget his long and
+poignant anxiety about Essex, his constant efforts to reconcile him with
+Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause without losing her favour; and,
+finally, the anguish of prosecuting his friend, and of knowing how hardly
+the world judged his own conduct.  Follow him into his relations with
+James I; his eager pursuit of favour, the multiplicity of his affairs,
+his pecuniary distresses, and the profound study and severe labour
+entailed by the preparation for and the composition of _The Advancement
+of Learning_ (1603–5).  He must be a stout-hearted Baconian who can
+believe that, between 1599 and 1605, Bacon was writing _Hamlet_, and
+other masterpieces of tragedy or comedy.  But all is possible to genius.
+What Mr. Greenwood’s Great Unknown was doing at this period, “neither
+does he know, nor do I know, but he only.”  He, no doubt, had abundance
+of leisure.
+
+At last Shakspere died (1616), and had not the mead of one melodious
+tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the shape of obituary
+verses.  This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement.  “Was it because ‘the
+friends of the Muses’ were for the most part aware that Shakespeare had
+not died with Shakspere?”  Did Jonson perchance think that his idea might
+be realised when he wrote,
+
+       “What a sight it were,
+    To see thee in our waters yet appear”?
+
+and so on.  Did Jonson expect and hope to see the genuine “Shakespeare”
+return to the stage, seven years after the death of Shakspere the actor,
+the Swan of Avon?  As Jonson was fairly sane, we can no more suspect him
+of having hoped for this miracle than believe that most of the poets knew
+the actor not to be the author.  Moreover Jonson, while desiring that
+Shakespeare might “shine forth” again and cheer the drooping stage,
+added,
+
+    “Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like Night,
+    And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light,”
+
+that is—the Folio of 1623.  Ben did not weave the amazing tissue of
+involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians.
+Beaumont died in the same year as Shakspere, who died in the depths of
+the country, weary of London.  Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary poems
+dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont?  Did Fletcher, did Jonson,
+produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend; in Fletcher’s
+case his constant partner?  No?  Were the poets, then, aware that
+Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems and plays were written by Bacon?
+{174a}
+
+I am not to discuss Shakespeare’s Will, the “second-best bed,” and so
+forth.  But as Shakespeare’s Will says not a word about his books, it is
+decided by Mr. Greenwood that he had no books.  Mr. Greenwood is a
+lawyer; so was my late friend Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton,
+who remarks that Shakespeare bequeathed “all the rest of my goods,
+chattels, leases, &c., to my son-in-law, John Hall, gent.”  (He really
+_was_ a “gent.” with authentic coat-armour.)
+
+It is with Mr. Elton’s opinion, not with my ignorance, that Mr. Greenwood
+must argue in proof of the view that “goods” are necessarily exclusive of
+books, for Mr. Elton takes it as a quite natural fact that Shakespeare’s
+books passed, with his other goods, to Mr. Hall, and thence to a Mr.
+Nash, to whom Mr. Hall left “my study of books” {175a} (library).  I only
+give this as a lawyer’s opinion.
+
+There is in the Bodleian an Aldine Ovid, “with Shakespeare’s” signature
+(merely Wm. She.), and a note, “This little volume of Ovid was given to
+me by W. Hall, who sayd it was once Will Shakespeare’s.”  I do not know
+that the signature (like that on Florio’s _Montaigne_, in the British
+Museum) has been detected as a forgery; nor do I know that Shakespeare’s
+not specially mentioning his books proves that he had none.  Lawyers
+appear to differ as to this inference: both Mr. Elton and Mr. Greenwood
+seem equally confident. {175b}  But if it were perfectly natural that the
+actor, Shakspere, should have no books, then he certainly made no effort,
+by the local colour of owning a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he
+_was_ the author.  Yet they believed that he was—really there is no
+wriggling out of it.  As regards any of his own MSS. which Shakespeare
+may have had (one would expect them to be at his theatre), and their
+monetary value, if they were not, as usual, the property of his company,
+and of him as a member thereof, we can discuss that question in the
+section headed “The First Folio.”
+
+It appears that Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, could write no more than
+her grandfather. {176a}  Nor, I repeat, could the Lady Jane Gordon,
+daughter of the great Earl of Huntly, when she was married to the Earl of
+Bothwell in 1566.  At all events, Lady Jane “made her mark.”  It may be
+feared that Judith, brought up in that very illiterate town of Stratford,
+under an illiterate mother, was neglected in her education.  Sad, but
+very common in women of her rank, and scarcely a proof that her father
+did not write the plays.
+
+As “nothing is known of the disposition and character” {176b} of
+Shakespeare’s grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, who died in 1670, it is not
+so paralysingly strange that nothing is known of any relics or anecdotes
+of Shakespeare which she may have possessed.  Mr. Greenwood “would have
+supposed that she would have had much to say about the great poet,”
+exhibited his books (if any), and so forth.  Perhaps she did,—but how, if
+we “know nothing about her disposition and character,” can we tell?  No
+interviewers rushed to her house (Abington Hall, Northampton-shire) with
+pencils and notebooks to record her utterances; no reporter interviewed
+her for the press.  It is surprising, is it not?
+
+The inference might be drawn, in the Baconian manner, that, during the
+Commonwealth and Restoration, “the friends of the Muses” knew that the
+actor was _not_ the author, and therefore did not interview his
+granddaughter in the country.
+
+“But, at any rate, we have the Stratford monument,” says Mr. Greenwood,
+and delves into this problem.  Even the Stratford monument of Shakespeare
+in the parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries.  If the gentle
+reader will throw his eye over the photograph {177a} of the monument as
+it now exists, he may not be able to say to the face of the poet—
+
+    “Thou wast that all to me, Will,
+    For which my soul did pine.”
+
+But if he has any knowledge of Jacobean busts on monuments, he will
+probably agree with me in saying, “This effigy, though executed by
+somebody who was not a Pheidias, and who perhaps worked merely from
+descriptions, is, at all events, Jacobean.”  The same may assuredly be
+said of the monument; it is in good Jacobean style: the pillars with
+their capitals are graceful: all the rest is in keeping; and the two
+inscriptions are in the square capital letters of inscriptions of the
+period; not in italic characters.  Distrusting my own _expertise_, I have
+consulted Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Holmes of the National Portrait
+Gallery.  They, with Mr. Spielmann, think the work to be of the early
+seventeenth century.
+
+Next, glance at the figure opposite.  This is a reproduction of “the
+earliest representation of the Bust” (and monument) in Dugdale’s
+_Antiquities of Warwickshire_ (1656).  Compare the two objects, point by
+point, from the potato on top with holes in it, of Dugdale, which is
+meant for a skull, through all the details,—bust and all.  Does Dugdale’s
+print, whether engraved by Hollar or not, represent a Jacobean work?
+Look at the two ludicrous children, their legs dangling in air; at the
+lions’ heads above the capitals of the pillars; at the lettering of the
+two visible words of the inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or
+lunatic, clasping a cushion to his abdomen.  That hideous design was not
+executed by an artist who “had his eye on the object,” if the object were
+a Jacobean monument: while the actual monument was fashioned in no period
+of art but the Jacobean.  From Digges’ rhymes in the Folio of 1623, we
+know that Shakespeare already had his “Stratford monument.”  _The
+existing object is what he had_; the monument in Dugdale is what, I hope,
+no architect of 1616–23 could have imagined or designed.
+
+    [Picture: The Monument in Dugdale’s “History of the Antiquities of
+       Warwickshire” (1656)  (By permission of John Murray, Esq.)]
+
+Dugdale’s engraving is not a correct copy of any genuine Jacobean work of
+art.  Is Dugdale accurate in his reproductions of other monuments in
+Stratford Church?  To satisfy himself on this point, Sir George
+Trevelyan, as he wrote to me (June 13, 1912), “made a sketch of the Carew
+Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and found that the
+discrepancies between the original tomb and the representation in
+Dugdale’s _Warwickshire_ are far and away greater than in the monument to
+William Shakespeare.”
+
+Mr. Greenwood, {179a} while justly observing that “the little sitting
+figures . . . are placed as no monumental sculptor would place them,” “on
+the whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale’s figure . . .  It is impossible to suppose that
+Hollar would have drawn and that Dugdale would have published a mere
+travesty of the Stratford Monument.”
+
+I do not know who drew the design, but a travesty of Jacobean work it is
+in every detail of the monument.  A travesty is what Dugdale gives as a
+representation of the Carew monument.  Mr. Greenwood, elsewhere,
+repeating his criticism of the impossible figures of children, says:
+“This is certainly mere matter of detail, and, in the absence of other
+evidence, would give us no warrant for doubting the substantial accuracy
+of Dugdale’s presentment of the ‘Shakespeare’ bust.” {180a}
+
+Why are we to believe that Dugdale’s artist was merely fantastic in his
+design of the children (and also remote from Jacobean taste in every
+detail), and yet to credit him with “substantial accuracy” in his
+half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cushion to his stomach?
+With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept him
+as accurate in his representation of the bust?  Moreover, other evidence
+is not wanting.  It is positively certain that the monument existing in
+1748, was then known as “the original monument,” and that no other
+monument was put in its place, at that date or later.
+
+            [Picture: The Carew Monument in Stratford Church]
+
+ [Picture: The Carew Monument as Represented in Dugdale’s “History of the
+                   Antiquities of Warwickshire” (1656)]
+
+Now Mrs. Stopes {180b} argues that in 1748 the monument was “entirely
+reconstructed,” and so must have become no longer what Dugdale’s man
+drew, but what we see to-day.  It is positively certain that her opinion
+is erroneous.
+
+If ever what we see to-day was substituted for anything like what
+Dugdale’s man drew, the date of the substitution is unknown.
+
+Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove her theory.
+They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an unnamed
+“contemporary account.” {181a}  This account Mrs. Stopes, with her
+tireless industry, found in the Wheler manuscripts, among papers of the
+Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master of the Grammar School.  In one
+paper of September 1740 “the original monument” is said to be “much
+impaired and decayed.”  There was a scheme for making “a new monument” in
+Westminster Abbey.  _That_, I venture to think, would have been in
+Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and style.  But there was no money for
+a new monument.  Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of November 20, 1748,
+showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather of Mrs. Siddons)
+was at Stratford with “a cry of players.”  He devoted the proceeds of a
+performance of _Othello_ to the reparation of the then existing monument.
+The amount was twelve pounds ten shillings.  The affair dragged on, one
+of the Church-wardens, a blacksmith, held the £12, 10_s._, and was
+troublesome.  The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be
+signed, but was not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly
+concerned in the matter.  It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or
+painter, is to “take care, according to his ability, that the monument
+shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected.”
+This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene.  Another form of words
+was later adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, “to repair and
+beautify, or to have the direction of repairing and beautifying, _the
+original monument_ of Shakespeare the poet.”  Mrs. Stopes infers, justly
+in my opinion, that Hall “would fill up the gaps, restore what was
+amissing as he thought it ought to be, and finally repaint it according
+to the original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see.”
+In his _History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon_, {182a} Mr. Wheler
+tells us that this was what Hall did.  “In the year 1748 the monument was
+carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust, &c., as much as
+possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner, of Stratford.”
+
+It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting
+is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 “painted in white,” to
+please Malone.  It was repainted in 1861.
+
+Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do, and
+what, according to Wheler, he did.  She writes: “It would only be giving
+good value for his money” (£12, 10_s._) “to his churchwardens if Hall
+added (_sic_) a cloak, a pen, and manuscript.”  He “could not help
+changing” the face, and so on.
+
+Now it was physically impossible to _add_ a cloak, a pen, and manuscript
+to such a stone bust as Dugdale’s man shows; to take away the cushion
+pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head.  Mr. Hall, if he was to
+give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust, and, to give
+us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale’s print, had to
+construct an entirely new monument.  Now Hall was a painter, not (like
+Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor.  _Pour tout potage_ he had
+but £12, 10_s._  He could not do, and he did not do these things! he did
+not destroy “the original monument” and make a new monument in Jacobean
+style.  He was straitly ordered to “repair and beautify the original
+monument”; he did repair it, and repainted the colours.  That is all.  I
+do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us {183a} about the repairing
+of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the pen; work which,
+he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790.  He
+gives no authority, and Baconians may say that he was hoaxed, or “lied
+with circumstance.”
+
+Mr. Greenwood {183b} quotes Halliwell-Phillipps’s _Works of Shakespeare_
+(1853), in which he says that the design in Dugdale’s book “is evidently
+too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being that it was
+not taken from the monument itself.”  Indeed the designer is so
+inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin inscription as
+“Judicyo,” just as Oudry blunders in the Latin inscription of a portrait
+of Mary Stuart which he copied badly.  Mr. Greenwood proceeds: “In his
+_Outlines_ Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale.  His engraving was doubtless
+too inconvenient to be brought to public notice!”  Here Halliwell is
+accused of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about
+the repeated reparation of the writing hand,—not represented in Dugdale’s
+design,—he also lied with circumstance.  But he certainly quoted a
+genuine “contemporary account” of the orders for repairing and
+beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he also had
+records for what he says about reparations of the hand and pen.  He
+speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts of the
+monument, though not in his _Outlines_; and I observe that, in Mrs.
+Stopes’s papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748, at
+which mention was made of “the materials” which Hall was to use for
+repairs.
+
+To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and bust
+speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616–23) and against the
+Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose
+that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590–1620 can be of a
+different opinion.  In the same way I do not expect any artist or
+engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe’s _Shakespeare_
+(1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies of
+the design in Dugdale, with modifications made _à plaisir_.  In Pope’s
+edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach to accuracy,
+but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy and
+sculpturally impossible face borrowed from “the Chandos portrait,” which,
+in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of
+Shakespeare.  None of them, I conceive, was painted from the life.
+
+The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied
+in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words
+over this speculation.  Mr. Greenwood writes that “if I should be told
+that Dugdale’s effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an
+exceptionally bad harvest, ‘I should not feel it to be strange!’  Neither
+should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the
+presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from
+high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity.”
+
+ [Picture: From Vertue’s Engraving of the Monument (1725)  (By permission
+                          of John Murray, Esq.)]
+
+“_I_ should not feel it to be strange” if a Baconian told me that the
+effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the dead
+Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I were
+asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood’s words, “Was Dugdale’s bust thought to
+bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of Stratford?  Or
+was it thought that the presence of a woolsack” (the cushion) “might be
+taken as indicating that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support
+to a certain Lord Chancellor?” {186a}  Such, indeed, are the things that
+Baconians might readily say: do say, I believe.
+
+Dugdale’s engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription,
+still on the monument:
+
+    _Judicio Pylium_, _genio Socratem_, _arte Maronem_
+       _Terra tegit_, _populus mæret_, _Olympus habet_:
+
+“Earth covers, Olympus” (heaven? or the Muses’ Hill?) “holds him who was
+a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his Dæmon”
+(“Genius”).  As for the “Genius,” or dæmon of Socrates, and the permitted
+false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the
+use of _Olympus_ for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to consult the
+learning of Mr. Elton. {186b}  The poet who made such notable false
+quantities in his plays had no cause to object to another on his
+monument.  We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or
+who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought
+Shakespeare (or Bacon?) “a clayver man.”  The monument (if a trembling
+conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety
+of Shakespeare’s daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall.  They
+exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin
+inscription.  Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs.
+Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. {187a}  It opens
+like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of
+Christian mysticism.  Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a
+few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.
+
+The famous “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,” and so on, on the stone
+in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or
+lay, is the first of “the last lines written, we are told,” {187b} “by
+the author of _Hamlet_.”  Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four
+lines of doggerel?  Is it conceivable that the authority for
+Shakespeare’s authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr.
+Dowdall of Queen’s in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he
+says,—criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. {187c}  For
+Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere of
+Stratford.
+
+Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will’s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph
+spoke quite respectfully of her father’s intelligence.
+
+    “Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
+    Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
+    Something of Shakespeare was in _that_, but _this_
+    Wholly of Him with whom she’s now in bliss.” {187d}
+
+Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death he was still thought “witty”
+in Stratford.  But what could Stratford know?  Milton and Charles I were
+of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation
+after Shakespeare.  But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon
+(or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays and poems.  The
+secret, perhaps, so widely spread among “the friends of the Muses” in
+1616, was singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a
+general rule.
+
+I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which
+pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about
+his monument and his grave, and asks if he “died with a curse upon his
+lips, an imprecation against any man who might _move his bones_?  A mean
+and vulgar curse indeed!” {188a}  And the authority for the circumstance
+that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon his lips?
+
+About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost
+after Shakespeare’s death, W. Hall, a Queen’s man, Oxford (the W. Hall,
+perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare’s signature,
+true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about
+his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen’s.  Mr. Hall
+heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar
+curse.  He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the
+church, where all the bones dug up were piled, “they would load a great
+number of waggons.”  Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the
+Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and sextons, “for the most part a
+very ignorant sort of people.”
+
+If Shakespeare _did_, that accommodation of himself to his audience was
+the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. {189a}  Of course there is no
+evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the
+pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.
+
+Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter.
+Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben, as
+Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio “a good send-off.”  The
+engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if
+from any, it was executed.  Richard Burbage is known to have amused
+himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on a likeness
+of his old friend and fellow-actor.  If so, he may have succeeded no
+better than Mary Stuart’s embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait
+of her Majesty.
+
+That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while Shakespeare,
+as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the authorship of the
+plays.  Ben was a scholar, the darling of both Universities; constantly
+employed about the Court in arranging Masques; his learning and his
+Scottish blood may have led James I to notice him.  Ben, in his later
+years, was much in society; fashionable and literary.  He was the father
+of the literary “tribe of Ben.”  Thus he naturally sat for his portrait.
+In the same way George Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of
+Knox.  But as a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court
+as tutor of his King, and was the “good pen” of the anti-Marian nobles,
+Murray, Morton, and the rest.  Therefore Buchanan’s portrait was painted,
+while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently, after his death,
+from descriptions, for Beza’s _Icones_.  The Folio engraving may have no
+better source.  Without much minute research it is hard to find authentic
+portraits of Mary Stuart, and, just as in Shakespeare’s case, {190a} the
+market, in her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded with
+“mock-originals,” not even derived (in any case known to me) from genuine
+and authentic contemporary works.
+
+One thing is certain about the Stratford bust.  Baconians will believe
+that Dugdale’s man correctly represented the bust as it was in his time;
+and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs of Dugdale’s
+man’s fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of style; and in
+spite of documentary evidence that “the original monument” was not to be
+destroyed and replaced by the actual monument, but was merely “repaired
+and beautified” (painted afresh) by a local painter.
+
+
+
+
+X
+“THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE”
+
+
+IN perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but
+Non-Baconian Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to
+address him thus: Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in
+memory these statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly
+insisted, namely, that society in Stratford was not only not literary,
+but was illiterate.  Next pardon me for asking you to remember that the
+late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century did not resemble our
+fortunate age.  Some people read Shakespeare’s, Beaumont’s, and
+Fletcher’s plays.  This exercise is now very rarely practised.  But
+nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private lives and
+personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan and Jacobean
+playwrights, in the modern manner.  Of Shakespeare (pardon, I mean
+Shakspere), the actor, there is one contemporary anecdote, in my poor
+opinion a baseless waggery.  Of Beaumont there is none.  Of a hand-maid
+of Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at the end
+of the seventeenth century,—nothing better.  Meanwhile of Shakspere the
+“traditions” must be sought either at Stratford or in connection with the
+London Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand very
+late.
+
+As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any
+traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been literary.  That is
+absolutely certain.  Natives at Stratford had, by your own hypothesis,
+scant interest in literary anecdote.  Fifty years after Shakespeare’s
+death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit
+(though it was remembered in 1649, that he was “witty”), or any
+“wood-notes wild,” which he may have displayed or chirped at an early
+age.
+
+Such things were of no interest to Stratford.  If he made a speech when
+he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the circumstance might
+descend from one gaffer to another; he might even be remembered as “the
+best of his family,”—the least inefficient.  Given your non-literary and
+illiterate Stratford, and you can expect nothing more, and nothing
+better, than we receive.
+
+Let me illustrate by a modern example.  In 1866 I was an undergraduate of
+a year’s standing at Balliol College, Oxford, certainly not an unlettered
+academy.  In that year, the early and the best poems of a considerable
+Balliol poet were published: he had “gone down” some eight years before.
+Being young and green I eagerly sought for traditions about Mr.
+Swinburne.  One of his contemporaries, who took a First in the final
+Classical Schools, told me that “he was a smug.”  Another, that, as Mr.
+Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers,
+they proposed that they should combine to pay but a single subscription
+to the Cricket Club.  A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a
+moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm,—and
+told me nothing.  A white-haired College servant said that “Mr. Swinburne
+was a very quiet gentleman.”
+
+Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty
+years after Shakspere’s death,—a Civil War and the Reign of the Saints, a
+Restoration and a Revolution having intervened,—and ask us to be
+surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere’s early brilliance, a century
+before, survived at Stratford.
+
+A very humble parallel may follow.  Some foolish person went seeking
+early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.
+From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and
+interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs,
+hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for
+Gloucestershire and Oxford.  But about me the inquiring literary snipe
+only heard that “Andra was aye the stupid ane o’ the fam’ly.”  Yet, I,
+too, had bowled for the local club, _non sine gloria_!  Even _that_ was
+forgotten.
+
+Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow
+townsman’s youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from
+sixty to a hundred years after date.  It is not in human nature that what
+was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the
+grandson.  Go to “Thrums” and ask for literary memories of the youth of
+Mr. Barrie.
+
+Yet {198a} the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of
+Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a
+fever after drink taken (_where_, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was
+remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant
+places.  Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben?
+Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly
+malodorous and densely ignorant _bourgade_, where, however, the “wit” of
+Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649.  See the epithet
+on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.
+
+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!”
+{200a}
+
+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.” {201a}  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.” {201b}  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), {207a} 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.” {208a}
+
+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.” {210a}  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.
+{215a}  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?”
+{216a}  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.”
+{217a}
+
+Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, {217b} “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’?” {218a}
+
+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. {219a}
+
+“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.” {219b}
+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.” {219c}
+
+_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. {220a}  Now the man for whom Ben, in 1623, was “doing work”—was
+BACON,—so Judge Webb says. {220b}
+
+Therefore, by this hypothesis of Mr. Greenwood, {220c} the Great Unknown
+was Bacon,—just the hypothesis of the common Baconian.
+
+Is my reasoning erroneous?  Is the “supposing” suggested by Mr. Greenwood
+{220d} any other than that of Miss Delia Bacon, and Judge Webb?  True,
+Mr. Greenwood’s Baconian “supposing” is only a working hypothesis: not a
+confirmed belief.  But it is useful to his argument (see “Ben Jonson and
+Shakespeare”) when he wants to explain away Ben’s evidence, in his verses
+in the Folio, to the Stratford actor as the Author.
+
+Mr. Greenwood writes, in the first page of his Preface: “It is no part of
+my plan or intention to defend that theory,” “the Baconian theory.”
+Apparently it pops out contrary to the intention of Mr. Greenwood.  But
+pop out it does: at least I can find no flaw in the reasoning of my
+detection of Bacon: I see no way out of it except this: after
+recapitulating what is said about Ben as one of Bacon’s “good pens” with
+other details, Mr. Greenwood says, “But no doubt that way madness lies!”
+{221a}  Ah no! not madness, no, but Baconism “lies that way.”  However,
+“let it be granted” (as Euclid says in his sportsmanlike way) that Mr.
+Greenwood by no means thinks that his “concealed poet” is Bacon—only some
+one similar and similarly situated and still active in 1623, and occupied
+with other business than supervising a collected edition of plays written
+under his “_nom de plume_” of Shakespeare.  Bacon, too, was busy, with
+supervising, or toiling at the Latin translation of his scientific works,
+and Ben (according to Judge Webb) was busy in turning the _Advancement of
+Learning_ into Latin prose.  Mr. Greenwood quotes, without reference,
+Archbishop Tenison as saying that Ben helped Bacon in doing his works
+into Latin. {221b}  Tenison is a very late witness.  The prophetic soul
+of Bacon did not quite trust English to last as long as Latin, or he
+thought Latin, the _lingua franca_ of Europe in his day, more easily
+accessible to foreign students, as, of course, it was.  Thus Bacon was
+very busy; so was Ben.  The sad consequence of Ben’s business, perhaps,
+is that the editing of the Folio is notoriously bad; whether Ben were the
+Editor or not, it is infamously bad.
+
+Conceivably Mr. Greenwood is of the same opinion.  He says, “It stands
+admitted that a very large part of that volume” (the Folio) “consists of
+work that is not ‘Shakespeare’s’ at all.”
+
+How strange, if Ben edited it for the Great Unknown—who knew, if any
+human being knew, what work was “Shakespeare’s”!  On Mr. Greenwood’s
+hypothesis, {222a} or “supposing,” the Unknown Author “may well have
+conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which
+had been written” (not “published,” _written_) “under the name of
+Shakespeare, and, being himself busy with other matters, he may have
+entrusted the business to” some “good pen,” “and why not to”—Ben.
+Nevertheless “a very large part of that volume consists of work that is
+not ‘Shakespeare’s’ at all.” {222b}  How did this occur?  The book {222c}
+is “that very doubtful ‘canon.’”  How, if “Shakespeare’s” man edited it
+for “Shakespeare”?  Did “Shakespeare” not care what stuff was placed
+under his immortal “_nom de plume_”?
+
+It is not my fault if I think that Mr. Greenwood’s hypotheses {222d}—the
+genuine “Shakespeare” either revised his own works, or put Ben on the
+editorial task—are absolutely contradicted by his statements in another
+part of his book. {222e}  For the genuine “Shakespeare” knew what plays
+he had written, knew what he could honestly put forth as his own, as
+“Shakespeare’s.”  Or, if he placed the task of editing in Ben’s hands, he
+must have told Ben what plays were of his own making.  In either case the
+Folio would contain these, and no others.  But—“the _plat
+contraire_,”—the very reverse,—is stated by Mr. Greenwood.  “It stands
+admitted that a very large portion of that volume” (the Folio) “consists
+of work that is not ‘Shakespeare’s’” (is not Bacon’s, or the other man’s)
+“at all.” {223a}  Then away fly the hypotheses {223b} that the
+auto-Shakespeare, or that Ben, employed by the auto-Shakespeare
+(apparently Bacon) revised, edited, and prepared for publication the
+auto-Shakespearean plays.  For Mr. Greenwood “has already dealt with
+_Titus_ (_Andronicus_) and _Henry VI_,” {223c} and proved them not to be
+auto-Shakespearean—and he adds “there are many other plays in that very
+doubtful ‘canon’” (the Folio) “which, by universal admission, contain
+much non-Shakespearean composition.” {223d}  Perhaps! but if so the two
+hypotheses, {223e} that either the genuine Shakespeare {223f} revised
+(“is it not a more natural solution that ‘Shakespeare’ himself revised
+his works for publication, and that some part, at any rate, of this
+revision {223g} was done after 1616 and before 1623?”), or {223h} that he
+gave Ben (who was working, by the conjecture, for Bacon) the task of
+editing the Folio,—are annihilated.  For neither the auto-Shakespeare (if
+honest), nor Ben (if sober), could have stuffed the Folio full of
+non-Shakespearean work,—including four “non-Shakespearean” plays,—nor
+could the Folio be “that very doubtful canon.” {224a}  Again, if either
+the auto-Shakespeare or Ben following his instructions, were Editor,
+neither could have, as the Folio Editor had “evidently no little doubt
+about” _Troilus and Cressida_. {224b}
+
+Neither Ben, nor the actual Simon Pure, the author, the auto-Shakespeare,
+could fail to know the truth about _Trodus and Cressida_.  But the Editor
+{224c} did _not_ know the truth, the whole canon is “doubtful.”
+Therefore the hypothesis, the “supposing,” that the actual author did the
+revising, {224d} and the other hypothesis that he gave Ben the work,
+{224e} seem to me wholly impossible.  But Mr. Greenwood needs the
+“supposings” of pp. 290, 293; and as he rejects _Titus Andronicus_ and
+_Henry VI_ (both in the Folio), he also needs the contradictory views of
+pp. 351, 358.  On which set of supposings and averments does he stand to
+win?
+
+Perhaps he thinks to find a way out of what appears to me to be a dilemma
+in the following fashion: He will not accept _Titus Andronicus_ and
+_Henry VI_, though both are in the Folio, as the work of _his_
+“Shakespeare,” his Unknown, the Bacon of the Baconians.  Well, we ask, if
+your Unknown, or Bacon, or Ben,—instructed by Bacon, or by the
+Unknown,—edited the Folio, how could any one of the three insert _Titus_,
+and _Henry VI_, and be “in no little doubt about” _Troilus and Cressida_?
+Bacon, or the Unknown, or the Editor employed by either, knew perfectly
+well which plays either man could honestly claim as his own work, done
+under the “_nom de plume_” of “William Shakespeare” (with or without the
+hyphen).  Yet the Editor of the Folio does not know—and Mr. Greenwood
+does know—_Henry VI_ and _Titus_ are “wrong ones.”
+
+Mr. Greenwood’s way out, if I follow him, is this: {225a} “Judge
+Stotsenburg asks, ‘Who wrote _The Taming of a Shrew_ printed in 1594, and
+who wrote _Titus Andronicus_, _Henry VI_, or _King Lear_ referred to in
+the Diary?’” (Henslowe’s).  The Judge continues: “Neither Collier nor any
+of the Shaxper commentators make (_sic_) any claim to their authorship in
+behalf of William Shaxper.  Since these plays have the same names as
+those included in the Folio of 1623 the presumption is that they are the
+same plays until the contrary is shown.  Of course it may be shown,
+either that those in the Folio are entirely different except in name, or
+that these plays were revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom
+they” (who?) “called Shakespeare.”
+
+Mr. Greenwood says, “My own conviction is that . . . these plays were
+‘revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare.’” {226a}  (Whom _who_ called Shakespeare?)  In that case
+these plays,—say _Titus Andronicus_ and _Henry VI_, Part 1,—which Mr.
+Greenwood denies to _his_ “Shakespeare” were just as much _his_
+Shakespeare’s plays as any other plays (and there are several), which
+_his_ Shakespeare “revised, improved, and dressed.”  Yet _his_
+Shakespeare is _not_ author of _Henry VI_, {226b} not the author of
+_Titus Andronicus_. {226c}  “Mr. Anders,” writes Mr. Greenwood, “makes
+what I think to be a great error in citing _Henry VI_ and _Titus_ as
+genuine plays of Shakespeare.” {226d}
+
+He hammers at this denial in nineteen references in his Index to _Titus
+Andronicus_.  Yet Ben, or Bacon, or the Unknown thought that these plays
+_were_ “genuine plays” of “Shakespeare,” the concealed author—Bacon or
+Mr. Greenwood’s man.  It appears that the immense poet who used the “_nom
+de plume_” of “Shakespeare” did not know the plays of which he could
+rightfully call himself the author; that (not foreseeing Mr. Greenwood’s
+constantly repeated objections) he boldly annexed four plays, or two
+certainly, which Mr. Greenwood denies to him, and another about which
+“the Folio Editor was in no little doubt.”
+
+Finally, {227a} Mr. Greenwood is “convinced,” “it is my conviction” that
+some plays which he often denies to his “Shakespeare” were “revised,
+improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare.”  That
+some one, if he edited or caused to be edited the Folio, thought that his
+revision, improvement, and dressing up of the plays gave him a right to
+claim their authorship—and Mr. Greenwood, a dozen times and more, denies
+to him their authorship.
+
+One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic’s meaning.  _The Taming
+of a Shrew_, _Titus_, _Henry VI_, and _King Lear_, referred to in
+Henslowe’s “Diary,” are not “Shakespearean,” we are repeatedly told.  But
+“my own conviction is that . . . ” these plays were “revised, improved,
+and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare.”  But to be
+revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare,
+is to be as truly “Shakespearean” work as is any play so handled “by
+Shakespeare.”  Thus the plays mentioned are as truly “Shakespearean” as
+any others in which “Shakespeare” worked on an earlier canvas, and also
+_Titus_ “is not _Shakespearean_ at all.”  Mr. Greenwood, I repeat,
+constantly denies the “Shakespearean” character to _Titus_ and _Henry
+VI_.  “The conclusion of the whole matter is that _Titus_ and _The
+Trilogy of Henry VI_ are not the work of Shakespeare: that his hand is
+probably not to be found at all in _Titus_, and only once or twice, if at
+all, in _Henry VI_, Part I, but that he it probably was who altered and
+remodelled the two parts of the old _Contention of the Houses of York and
+Lancaster_, thereby producing _Henry VI_, Parts II and III.” {228a}
+
+Yet {228b} _Titus_ and _Henry VI_ appear as “revised, improved, and
+dressed” by the mysterious “some one whom they called Shakespeare.”  If
+Mr. Greenwood’s conclusion {228c} be correct, “Shakespeare” had no right
+to place _Henry VI_, Part I, and _Titus_ in his Folio.  If his
+“conviction” {228d} be correct, Shakespeare had as good a right to them
+as to any of the plays which he revised, and improved, and dressed.  They
+_must_ be “Shakespearean” if Mr. Greenwood is right {228e} in his
+suggestion that “Shakespeare” either revised his works for publication
+between 1616 and 1623, or set his man, Ben Jonson, upon that business.
+Yet neither one nor the other knew what to make of _Troilus and
+Cressida_.  “The Folio Editor had, evidently, no little doubt about that
+play.” {228f}
+
+So neither “Shakespeare” nor Ben, instructed by him, can have been “the
+Folio Editor.”  Consequently Mr. Greenwood must abandon his suggestion
+that either man was the Editor, and may return to his rejection of
+_Titus_ and _Henry VI_, Part I.  But he clings to it.  He finds in
+Henslowe’s Diary “references to, and records of the writing of, such
+plays” as, among others, _Titus Andronicus_, and _Henry VI_. {229a}
+
+Mr. Greenwood, after rejecting a theory of some one, says, “Far more
+likely does it appear that there was a great man of the time whose genius
+was capable of ‘transforming dross into gold,’ who took these plays, and,
+in great part, rewrote and revised them, leaving sometimes more, and
+sometimes less of the original work; and that so rewritten, revised, and
+transformed they appeared as the plays of ‘Shake-speare.’” {229b}
+
+This statement is made {229c} about “these plays,” including _Titus
+Andronicus_ and _Henry VI_, while {229d} “_Titus_ and the _Trilogy of
+Henry VI_ are not the work of Shakespeare . . . his hand is probably not
+to be found at all in _Titus_, and only once or twice in _Henry VI_, Part
+I,” though he probably made Parts II and III out of older plays.
+
+I do not know where to have the critic.  If _Henry VI_, Part I, and
+_Titus_ are in no sense by “Shakespeare,” then neither “Shakespeare” nor
+Ben for him edited or had anything to do with the editing of the Folio.
+If either or both had to do with the editing, as the critic suggests,
+then he is wrong in denying Shakespearean origin to _Titus_ and _Henry
+VI_, Part I.
+
+Of course one sees a way out of the dilemma for the great
+auto-Shakespeare himself, who, by one hypothesis, handed over the editing
+of his plays to Ben (_he_, by Mr. Greenwood’s “supposing,” was deviling
+at literary jobs for Bacon).  The auto-Shakespeare merely tells Ben to
+edit his plays, and never even gives him a list of them.  Then Ben brings
+him the Folio, and the author looks at the list of Plays.
+
+“Mr. Jonson,” he says, “I have hitherto held thee for an honest scholar
+and a deserving man in the quality thou dost profess.  But thou hast
+brought me a maimed and deformed printed copy of that which I did write
+for my own recreation, not wishful to be known for so light a thing as a
+poet.  Moreover, thou hast placed among these my trifles, four plays to
+which I never put a finger, and others in which I had no more than a
+thumb.  The Seneschal, Mr. Jonson, will pay thee what is due to thee; thy
+fardels shall be sent whithersoever thou wilt, and, Mary!  Mr. Jonson, I
+bid thee never more be officer of mine.”
+
+This painful discourse must have been held at Gorhambury,—if Ben edited
+the Folio—for Francis.
+
+It is manifest, I hope, that about the Folio Mr. Greenwood speaks with
+two voices, and these very discordant.  It is also manifest that, whoever
+wrote the plays left his materials in deep neglect, and that, when they
+were collected, some one gathered them up in extreme disorder.  It is
+extraordinary that the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood do not see the fallacy
+of their own reasoning in this matter of the Folio.  They constantly
+ridicule the old view that the actor, Will Shakspere (if, by miracle, he
+were the author of the plays), could have left them to take their
+fortunes.  They are asked, what did other playwrights do in that age?
+They often parted with their whole copyright to the actors of this or
+that company, or to Henslowe.  The new owners could alter the plays at
+will, and were notoriously anxious to keep them out of print, lest other
+companies should act them.  As Mr. Greenwood writes, {231a} “Such, we are
+told, was the universal custom with dramatists of the day; they ‘kept no
+copies’ of their plays, and thought no more about them.  It will, I
+suppose, be set down to fanaticism that I should doubt the truth of this
+proposition, that I doubt if it be consonant with the known facts of
+human nature.”  But whom, except Jonson, does Mr. Greenwood find editing
+and publishing his plays?  Beaumont, Fletcher, Heywood?  No!
+
+If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as bad as
+Will’s.  If he were alive and revised his own work for publication,
+{231b} he did it as the office cat might have done it in hours of play.
+If, on the other side, he handed the editorial task over to Ben, {232a}
+then he did not even give Ben a list of his genuine works.  Mr. Greenwood
+cites the case of Ben Jonson, a notorious and, I think, solitary
+exception.  Ben was and often proclaimed himself to be essentially a
+scholar.  He took as much pains in prefacing, editing, and annotating his
+plays, as he would have taken had the texts been those of Greek
+tragedians.
+
+Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour of the
+actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he did not bestir
+himself, and bring them out in a collected edition.  Yet no English
+dramatist ventured on doing such a thing, till Ben thus collected his
+“works” (and was laughed at) in 1616.  The example might have encouraged
+Will to be up and doing, but he died early in 1616.  If Will were _not_
+the author, what care was Bacon, or the Unknown, taking of his many
+manuscript plays, and for the proper editing of those which had appeared
+separately in pamphlets?  As indolent and casual as Will, the great
+Author, Bacon or another, left the plays to take their chances.  Mr.
+Greenwood says that “_if the author_” (Bacon or somebody very like him)
+“_had been careless about keeping copies of his manuscripts_ . . . ”
+{232b}  What an “if” in the case of the great Author!  This gross
+neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised by the Great
+Unknown himself.
+
+In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, “There is overwhelming authority for the
+view that _Titus Andronicus_ is not _Shakespearean_ at all.” {233a}  In
+that case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for either,
+can have been the person who put _Titus_ into the Folio.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+THE evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author with
+Shakspere the actor, is “the strength of the Stratfordian faith,” says
+Mr. Greenwood.  “But I think it will be admitted that the various
+Jonsonian utterances with regard to ‘Shakespeare’ are by no means easy to
+reconcile one with the other.” {237a}
+
+It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood’s forty-seven pages
+about the evidence of Jonson.  But, first, whenever in written words or
+in reported conversation, Ben speaks of Shakespeare by name, he speaks of
+his _works_: in 1619 to Drummond of Hawthornden; in 1623 in commendatory
+verses to the Folio; while, about 1630, probably, in his posthumously
+published _Discourses_, he writes on Shakespeare as the friend and
+“fellow” of the players, on Shakespeare as his own friend, and as a
+dramatist.  On each of these three occasions, Ben’s _tone_ varies.  In
+1619 he said no more to Drummond of Hawthornden (apparently on two
+separate occasions) than that Shakespeare “lacked art,” and made the
+mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.
+
+In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond he
+also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in an
+epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the
+commendatory verses in the Folio.  He spoke still more harshly of
+Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, and
+Tyræus!  He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with whom he had first
+quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with him in a play; and
+very generously and to his great peril, sharing his imprisonment.  To
+Drummond, Jonson merely said that he “beat Marston and took away his
+pistol.”  Of Sir John Beaumont, brother of the dramatist, Ben had written
+a most hyperbolical eulogy in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond
+Ben did not speak of him.  Such was Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical;
+in conversation “a despiser of others, and praiser of himself.”  Compare
+Ben’s three remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond.  Donne deserved
+hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being understood:
+and Donne was in some points the first of living poets.
+
+Mr. Greenwood’s effort to disable Jonson’s evidence rests on the
+contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare’s poetry, in notices
+scattered through some thirty years.  Jonson, it is argued, cannot on
+each occasion mean Will.  He must now mean Will, now the Great Unknown,
+and now—both at once.  Yet I have proved that Ben was the least
+consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion, and on his humour at
+the moment.  This is a commonplace of literary history.  The Baconians do
+not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores it, and bases his
+argument on facts which may be unknown to his readers.  We have noted
+Ben’s words of 1619, and touched on his panegyric of 1623.  Thirdly,
+about 1630 probably, Ben wrote in his manuscript book _Discourses_ an
+affectionate but critical page on Shakespeare as a man and an author.
+Always, in prose, and in verse, and in recorded conversation, Ben
+explicitly identified Shakspere (William, of Stratford) with the author
+of the plays usually ascribed to him.  But the Baconian Judge Webb (in
+extreme old age), and the anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others,
+choose to interpret Ben’s words on the theory that, in 1623, he “had his
+tongue in his cheek”; that, like Odysseus, he “mingled things false with
+true,” that _they_ know what is true from what is false, and can undo the
+many knots which Ben tied in his tongue.  How they succeed we shall see.
+
+In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name (1619,
+1623, 1630?), Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival at a much
+earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in _The Poetaster_
+(1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist in an epigram, _Poet-Ape_,
+published in his collected works of 1616; but probably written as early
+as 1602.  It is well known that in 1598 Shakespeare’s company acted Ben’s
+_Every Man in His Humour_.  It appears that he conceived some grudge
+against the actors, and apparently against Shakespeare and other
+playwrights, for, in 1601, his _Poetaster_ is a satire both on
+playwrights and on actors, whom he calls “apes.”  The apparent attacks on
+Shakespeare are just such as Ben, if angry and envious, would direct
+against him; while we know of no other poet-player of the period to whom
+they could apply.  For example, in _The Poetaster_, Histrio, the actor,
+is advised to ingratiate himself with _Pantalabus_, “gent’man
+parcel-poet, his father was a man of worship, I tell thee.”  This is
+perhaps unmistakably a blow at Shakespeare, who had recently acquired for
+his father and himself arms, and the pleasure of writing himself
+“gentleman.”  This “parcel-poet gent’man” “pens lofty, in a new stalking
+style,”—he is thus an author, he “pens,” and in a high style.  He is
+called _Pantalabus_, from the Greek words for “to _take up all_,” which
+means that, as poet, he is a plagiarist.  Jonson repeats this charge in
+his verses called _Poet-Ape_—
+
+    “_He takes up all_, makes each man’s wit his own,
+    And told of this, he slights it.”
+
+In a scene added to _The Poetaster_ in 1616, the author (Ben) is advised
+not
+
+    “With a sad and serious verse to wound
+    Pantalabus, railing in his saucy jests,”
+
+and obviously slighting the charges of plagiarism.  Perhaps Ben is
+glancing at Shakespeare, who, if accused of plagiary by an angry rival,
+would merely laugh.
+
+A reply to the _Poetaster_, namely _Satiromastix_ (by Dekker and
+Marston?), introduces Jonson himself as babbling darkly about “Mr.
+Justice Shallow,” and “an Innocent Moor” (Othello?).  Here is question of
+“administering strong pills” to Jonson; _then_,
+
+    “What lumps of hard and indigested stuff,
+    Of bitter _Satirism_, of _Arrogance_,
+    Of _Self-love_, of _Detraction_, of a black
+    And stinking _Insolence_ should we fetch up!”
+
+This “pill” is a reply to Ben’s “purge” for the poets in his _Poetaster_.
+Oh, the sad old stuff!
+
+Referring to Jonson’s _Poetaster_, and to _Satiromastix_, the
+counter-attack, we find a passage in the Cambridge play, _The Return from
+Parnassus_ (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 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
+
+       “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 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.” {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 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.” {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 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 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 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?” {249a}
+
+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. {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. Basse,
+“but the evidence of authorship 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 pass 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 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, {253a} 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.” {254a}
+
+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. {255a})
+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.” {258a}
+
+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 {259a}
+“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.” {260a}
+
+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,
+
+    “Thou stand’st as if some mystery thou didst.”
+
+“What was that ‘mystery’?” asks Mr. Greenwood. {260b}  What indeed?  And
+what has all this to do with Ben’s commendatory verses for the Folio, two
+years later?  Mr. Greenwood also surmises, as we have seen, {260c} that
+Jonson was with Bacon, helping to translate _The Advancement of Learning_
+in June, 1623.
+
+Let us suppose that he was: what has that to do with Ben’s verses for the
+Folio?  Does Mr. Greenwood mean to hint that _Bacon_ was the “efficient
+cause operating to induce” Ben “to give the best possible send-off” to
+the Folio?  One does not see what interest Bacon had in stimulating the
+enthusiasm of Ben, unless we accept Bacon as author of the plays, which
+Mr. Greenwood does not.  If Mr. Greenwood thinks that Bacon was the
+author of the plays, then the facts are suitable to his belief.  But if
+he does not,—“I hold no brief for the Baconians,” he says,—how is all
+this passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon concerned with the subject in hand?
+
+Between the passage on some “efficient cause” “at the back of Ben’s
+mind,” {261a} and the passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621–3, {261b}
+six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the
+“efficient cause” of Ben’s verses of 1623, and his visits to Bacon in
+1621–3.  These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben’s laudations of
+Bacon, by name, in his _Discoveries_.  The first is entirely confined to
+praise of Bacon as an orator.  Bacon is next mentioned in a Catalogue of
+Writers as “_he who hath filled up all numbers_, and performed that in
+our tongue which may be preferred or compared either to _insolent Greece
+or haughty Rome_,” words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio
+verses.
+
+Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson’s Catalogue, to judge by the names he
+cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker, Essex,
+Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that “he is thinking mainly
+of wits and orators of his own and the preceding generation,” not of
+poets specially.  This is obvious; why should Ben name Shakespeare with
+More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop Gardiner, Egerton, Sandys, and
+Savile?  Yet “it is remarkable that no mention should be made of the
+great dramatist.”  Where is Spenser named, or Beaumont, or Chaucer, with
+whom Ben ranked Shakespeare?  Ben quoted of Bacon the line he wrote long
+before of Shakespeare as a poet, about “insolent Greece,” and all this is
+“remarkable,” and Mr. Greenwood finds it “not surprising” {262a} that the
+Baconians dwell on the “extraordinary coincidence of expression,” as if
+Ben were incapable of repeating a happy phrase from himself, and as if we
+should wonder at anything the Baconians may say or do.
+
+Another startling coincidence is that, in _Discoveries_, Ben said of
+Shakespeare “his wit was in his own power,” and wished that “the rule of
+it had been so too.”  Of Bacon, Ben wrote, “his language, where he could
+spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious.”  Thus Bacon _had_ “the
+rule of his own wit,” Bacon “_could_ spare or pass by a jest,” whereas
+Shakespeare apparently could not—so like were the two Dromios in this
+particular!  Strong in these convincing arguments, the Baconians ask (not
+so Mr. Greenwood, he is no Baconian), “were there then _two_ writers of
+whom this description was appropriate . . . ?”  Was there only one, and
+was it of Bacon, under the name of “Shakespeare,” that Ben wrote _De
+Shakespeare nostrati_?
+
+Read it again, substituting “Bacon” for “Shakespeare.”  “I remember the
+players,” and so on, and what has Bacon to do here?  “Sometimes it was
+necessary that _Bacon_ should be stopped.”  “Many times _Bacon_ fell into
+those things could not escape laughter,” such as Cæsar’s supposed line,
+“and such like, which were ridiculous.”  “_Bacon_ redeemed his vices with
+his virtues.  There was ever more in _Bacon_ to be praised than to be
+pardoned.”
+
+Thus freely, according to the Baconians, speaks Ben of Bacon, whom he
+here styles “Shakespeare,”—Heaven knows why! while crediting him with the
+players as his friends.  Ben could not think or speak thus of Bacon.  Mr.
+Greenwood occupies his space with these sagacities of the Baconians; one
+marvels why he takes the trouble.  We are asked why Ben wrote so little
+and that so cool (“I loved him on this side idolatry as much as any”)
+about Shakespeare.  Read through Ben’s _Discoveries_: what has he to say
+about any one of his great contemporary dramatists, from Marlowe to
+Beaumont?  He says nothing about any of them; though he had panegyrised
+them, as he panegyrised Beaumont, in verse.  In his prose _Discoveries_
+he speaks, among English dramatists, of Shakespeare alone.
+
+We are also asked by the Baconians to believe that his remarks on Bacon
+under the name of Shakespeare are really an addition to his more copious
+and infinitely more reverential observations on Bacon, named by his own
+name; “I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper
+to himself.”  Also (where Bacon is spoken of as Shakespeare) “He redeemed
+his vices by his virtues.  There was ever more in him to be praised than
+to be pardoned . . . Sometimes it was necessary that he should be stopped
+. . . Many times he fell into those things that could not escape
+laughter.”
+
+These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous.  The person
+spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians, and Mr. Greenwood
+sympathetically alludes to their ideas, {264a} which I cannot qualify in
+courteous terms.  Baconians “would, of course, explain the difficulty by
+saying that however sphinx-like were Jonson’s utterances, he had clearly
+distinct in his own mind two different personages, viz. Shakspere the
+player, and Shakespeare the real author of the plays and poems, and that
+if in the perplexing passage quoted from the _Discoveries_ he appears to
+confound one with the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had
+been imposed on him.”  They _would_ say, they _do_ say all that.  Ben is
+not to let out that Bacon is the author.  So he tells us of Bacon that he
+often made himself ridiculous, and so forth,—but he _pretends_ that he is
+speaking of Shakespeare.
+
+All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the search for
+“the efficient cause” of Ben’s panegyric (1623), in the Folio, on his
+Beloved Mr. William Shakespeare, and the discovery of Ben’s visits to
+Bacon in 1621–3.
+
+Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew the secret
+of Bacon’s authorship, and, stimulated by his hospitality, applauded his
+works in the Folio, while, as he must not disclose the secret, he
+throughout speaks of Bacon as Shakespeare, puns on that name in the line
+about seeming “to shake a lance,” and salutes the Lord of Gorhambury as
+“Sweet Swan of Avon”?  Mr. Greenwood cannot mean that; for he is not a
+Baconian.  What _does_ he mean?
+
+Put together his pages 483, 489–491.  On the former we find how “it would
+appear” that Jonson thought the issue of the Folio (1623) “a very special
+occasion,” and that perhaps if we could only “get to the back of his
+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.”  Then skip to pp. 489–491, and you find very special occasions:
+Bacon’s birthday feast with its “mystery”; Ben as one of Bacon’s “good
+pens,” in 1623.  “The best of these good pens, it seems, was Jonson.”
+{266a}  On what evidence does it “seem”?  The opinion of Judge Webb.
+
+Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, “the efficient cause
+operating to induce” Ben “to give the best possible send-off” to the
+Folio?  How could this be the “efficient cause” if Bacon were not the
+author of the plays?
+
+Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,
+
+    “Stands as if some mystery he did.”
+
+On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were a man
+likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be elaborately false about
+the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, it is hopelessly impossible to
+bring the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood (who “holds no brief for the
+Baconians”) to my point of view.  Mr. Greenwood rides off thus—what the
+Baconians do is unimportant.
+
+“There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are justifiable,
+some that it is actually a duty to tell.”  It may be so; I pray that I
+may never tell any of them (or any more of them).
+
+Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever he plumply
+denied that he wrote the _Waverley_ novels.  I do not judge Sir Walter.
+Heaven forbid!  But if, in Mr. Greenwood’s words, he, “we are told,
+thought it perfectly justifiable for a writer who wished to preserve his
+anonymity, to deny, when questioned, the authorship of a work, since the
+interrogator had no right to put such a question to him,” {267a} I
+disagree with Sir Walter.  Many other measures, in accordance with the
+conditions of each case, were open to him.  Some are formulated by his
+own Bucklaw, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, as regards questions about
+what occurred on his bridal night.  Bucklaw would challenge the man, and
+cut the lady, who asked questions.  But Scott’s case, as cited, applies
+only to Bacon (or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown), if _he_ were asked whether or
+not he were the author of the plays.  No idiot, at that date, was likely
+to put the question!  But, if anyone did ask, Bacon must either evade, or
+deny, or tell the truth.
+
+On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or tell the
+truth.  But the parallel of Scott is not applicable to any other person
+except to the author who wishes to preserve his anonymity, and is
+questioned.  The parallel does not apply to Ben.  _He_ had not written
+the Shakespearean plays.  Nobody was asking _him_ if he had written them.
+If he knew that the author was Bacon, and knew it under pledge of
+secrecy, and was asked (_per impossibile_) “Who wrote these plays?” he
+had only to say, “Look at the title-page.”  But no mortal was asking Ben
+the question.  But we are to suppose that, in the panegyric and in
+_Discoveries_, Ben chooses to assert, first, that Shakespeare was his
+Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon; and that he “loved him, on this side
+idolatry, as much as any.”  There is no evidence that he did love
+Shakespeare, except his own statement, when, according to the Baconians,
+he is really speaking of Bacon, and, according to Mr. Greenwood, of an
+unknown person, singularly like Bacon.  Consequently, unless we can prove
+that Ben really loved the actor, he is telling a disgustingly
+hypocritical and wholly needless falsehood, both before and after the
+death of Bacon.  To be silent about the authorship of a book, an
+authorship which is the secret of your friend and patron, is one thing
+and a blameless thing.  All the friends, some twenty, to whom Scott
+confided the secret of his authorship were silent.  But not one of them
+publicly averred that the author was their very dear friend, So-and-so,
+who was not Scott, and perhaps not their friend at all.  That was Ben’s
+line.  Thus the parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood, twice, {268a}
+is no parallel.  It has no kind of analogy with Ben’s alleged falsehoods,
+so elaborate, so incomprehensible except by Baconians, and, if he did not
+love the actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably hypocritical, and open to
+instant detection.
+
+It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which Ben is
+charged.  But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of writing his novels,
+which, let us say, he signed “James Hogg,” and died without confessing
+his secret, and without taking his elaborate precautions for its
+preservation on record.
+
+Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott’s secret, under vow of silence,
+and was determined to keep it at any cost.  He therefore, writing after
+the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in Scott’s lifetime, publishes verses
+declaring that Hogg was his “beloved” (an enormous fib), and that Hogg,
+“Sweet Swan of Ettrick,” was the author of the _Waverley_ novels.
+
+To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott’s death, leaves a note
+in prose to the effect that, while he loved Hogg on this side idolatry
+(again, a monstrous fable), he must confess that Hogg, author of the
+_Waverley_ novels, often fell into things that were ridiculous; and often
+needed to have a stopper put on him for all these remarks.  Lockhart,
+while speaking of Hogg, is thinking of Scott—and he makes the remarks
+solely to conceal Scott’s authorship of the novels—of which, on the
+hypothesis, nobody suspected Scott to be the author.  Lockhart must then
+have been what the Baconian Mr. Theobald calls Mr. Churton Collins, “a
+measureless liar,”—all for no reason.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no parallel, of
+Scott’s denying his own authorship, goes on, “for all we know, Jonson
+might have seen nothing in the least objectionable in the publication by
+some great personage of his dramatic works under a pseudonym” (under
+another man’s name really), “even though that pseudonym led to a wrong
+conception as to the authorship; and that, if, being a friend of that
+great personage, and working in his service” (Ben worked, by the theory,
+in Bacon’s), “he had solemnly engaged to preserve the secret inviolate,
+and not to reveal it even to posterity, then _doubtless_ (‘I thank thee,
+Jew’ (meaning Sir Sidney Lee), ‘for teaching me that word’!) he would
+have remained true to that solemn pledge.” {270a}
+
+To remain “true,” Ben had only to hold his peace.  But he lied up and
+down, and right and left, and even declared that Bacon was a friend of
+the players, and needed to be shut up, and made himself a laughing-stock
+in his plays,—styling Bacon “Shakespeare.”  All this, and much more of
+the same sort, we must steadfastly believe before we can be Baconians,
+for only by believing these doctrines can we get rid of Ben Jonson’s
+testimony to the authorship of Will Shakspere, Gent.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON
+
+
+LET us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find
+nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal.  Bacon was the
+author of the Shakespearean plays, they tell us.  Let us look rapidly at
+his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic supremacy, and
+imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous, when we consider his
+occupations and his ruling passion?
+
+Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware of it, and
+had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to do.  While still at
+Cambridge, and therefore before he was fifteen, he was utterly
+dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr. Rawley, with the scientific
+doctrines of the Schools.  In the study of nature they reasoned from
+certain accepted ideas, _a priori_ principles, not from what he came to
+call “interrogation of Nature.”  There were, indeed, and had long been
+experimental philosophers, but the school doctors went not beyond
+Aristotle; and discovered nothing.  As Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy
+Bacon asked himself, “If our study of nature be thus barren, our method
+of study must be wrong; might not a better method be found? . . .  Upon
+the conviction ‘This may be done,’ followed at once the question, _How_
+may it be done?  Upon that question answered followed the resolution to
+try and do it.”
+
+This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon, “the event which
+had a greater influence than any other upon his character and future
+course.  From that moment he had a vocation which employed and stimulated
+him . . . an object to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the
+human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough to fill the soul for
+ever with religious and heroic aspirations.” {274a}  The vocation, the
+idea, the object, were not poetical.
+
+In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was much
+concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in France,
+and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good government of
+his native country.  He could only aid that cause by the favour of
+Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament, where, despite his
+desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen.  He was
+obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and polemical
+literature, as were set him by people in power.  With these three great
+objects filling his heart, inspiring his ambition, and occupying his
+energies and time, we cannot easily believe, without direct external
+evidence, that he, or any mortal, could have leisure and detachment from
+his main objects (to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient to
+enable him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.
+
+Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might have
+penned sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow, he reports that he wrote “his
+first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which he called _Temporis
+Partus Maximus_, ‘The Greatest Birth of Time,’” and “we need not doubt
+that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to do.” {275a}  For the
+Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer (of which I am no
+judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man’s hours.  In 1584
+he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything very important of his
+occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long pamphlet, “Touching the
+Controversies of the Church of England.” {275b}  He had then leisure
+enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can
+neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof that he wrote _Love’s
+Labour’s Lost_!  By 1591–2, we learn much of him from his letter to
+Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he could meditate his
+philosophy.  He was apparently hard at scientific work.  “I account my
+ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most
+parts of action are.”  He adds, “The contemplative planet carries me away
+wholly,” and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls “vast
+contemplative ends.”  These he proceeds to describe: he does _not_ mean
+the writing of _Venus and Adonis_ (1593), nor of _Lucrece_ (1594), nor of
+comedies!  “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” and he recurs
+to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period.  “If I could
+purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the one, with frivolous
+disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the other with blind
+experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so
+many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded
+conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries . . . This,
+whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it
+favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be
+removed.”  If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the
+truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, “ . . .
+and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of
+truth . . . ” {276a}  Really, from first to last he was the prince of
+begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions,
+money, and more money.
+
+Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley
+at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, “my Lord Treasurer Burghley.”
+What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman’s philanthropy, and “vast
+speculative ends” (how _modern_ it all is!), and the rest of it?  But
+just because Bacon, at thirty-one, _is_ so extremely “green,” going to
+“take all knowledge for his province” (if some one will only subsidise
+him, and endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his
+reformation of science.  Surely no Baconian will deny it!  Being so
+deeply in earnest, taking his “study and meditation” so hard, I cannot
+see him as the author of _Venus and Adonis_, and whatever plays of the
+period,—say, _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_,
+_Henry VI_, Part I,—are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians.
+Of course my view is merely personal or “subjective.”  The Baconians’
+view is also “subjective.”  I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as
+intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative aims:—what he says
+that he desires to do, in science, is what he _did_, as far as he was
+able.  His other desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the
+conduct of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the
+public profit.  There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for
+competition in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a
+dozen other professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the
+absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor.
+
+You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do.  Argument is
+unavailing.  I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter to
+Cecil.  Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast _literary_
+aim.  They must take his alternative—to be “some sorry bookmaker, _or_ a
+pioneer in that mine of truth,” as meaning that he would either be the
+literary hack of a company of players, _or_ the founder of a regenerating
+philosophy.  But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called
+“bookmakers,” for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them
+from appearing as printed books.  If Bacon by “bookmaker” meant
+“playwright,” he put a modest value on his poetical work!
+
+Meanwhile (1591–2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful, and
+famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much excellent
+advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was not taken.  It
+is not a novel suggestion, that Essex is the young man to whom Bacon is
+so passionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed to
+Shakespeare.  “I applied myself to him” (that is, to Essex), says Bacon,
+“in a manner which, I think, happeneth rarely among men.”  The poet of
+the Sonnets applies himself to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which
+(luckily) “happeneth rarely among men.”
+
+It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon’s life.  But, if you pursue
+the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find that he does
+not speak _openly_ of a tenderly passionate attachment to that young man;
+not more than _this_, “I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself,
+to the best of my understanding, propositions and memorials of anything
+that might concern his Lordship’s honour, fortune, or service.” {279a}
+As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591–2), he had no great leisure
+for writing poetry and plays.  Moreover, speaking as a poet, in the
+Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion to
+Essex into the symbolism of his passionate verse.  _Was Essex then a
+married man_?  If so, the Sonneteer’s insistence on his marrying must be
+symbolical of—anything else you please.
+
+We know that Bacon, at this period, “did nothing” but “ruminate” about
+Essex.  The words are his own! (1604).  No plays, no _Venus and Adonis_,
+nothing but enthusiastic service of Essex and the Sonnets.  Mr. Spedding,
+indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Essex (November 17, 1592),
+Bacon kindly contributed such matter as “Mr. Bacon in Praise of
+Knowledge” (containing his usual views about regenerating science), and
+“Mr. Bacon’s Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.” {279b}  Both are
+excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.
+
+He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson’s (?)
+famous indictment of Elizabeth’s Government, in _Observations on a
+Libel_. {280a}  What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was not
+solely devoted to _Venus and Adonis_ and to furbishing-up old plays,
+though, no doubt, he _may_ have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and
+indulged his luscious imaginations in _Venus and Adonis_.  I would not
+limit the potentialities of his genius.  But, certainly, this amazing man
+was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention his severe
+“study and meditation” on science.
+
+All these activities of Bacon, in the year of _Venus and Adonis_, do not
+exhaust his exercises.  Bacon, living laborious days, plunged into the
+debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth’s disgrace, and
+vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship, and went on to
+write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the
+office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex’s affairs, to plead at the
+Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit for the
+Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of “Formularies and
+Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for the
+Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed Essex
+(1600–1), while always “labouring in secret” at that vast aim of the
+reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, he says,
+and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs of State.
+{281a}  Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the
+most onerous.  He was also writing _The Advancement of Learning_ (1605).
+“I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, “since I was of any
+understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done.”
+{281b}  His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came
+between him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing,
+and his private schemes and suits.  To this burden of Atlas the Baconians
+add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare’s company, and the
+inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.  Even without this
+considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but with
+it—he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him and his
+plot—to write plays under the pseudonym of “William Shakespeare.”
+
+Talk of miracles as things which do not happen!  The activities of Bacon
+from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man’s mind and heart,—especially
+his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his passionately
+adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable
+that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at
+least a hundred and six, if not much older.  No wonder that he turned to
+tragedy, _Lear_, _Macbeth_, _Othello_, and saw life _en noir_: man
+delighted him not, nor woman either.
+
+The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon,
+do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility.  But
+they make it an intellectual miracle.  Perhaps I may be allowed to set
+off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere’s knowledge
+and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a}  I do not pretend to understand
+how Will came to have them at the tip of his pen.  Thus it may be argued
+that the Sonnets are by Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so
+familiar to the author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice
+an accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious
+productions.  (But why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of
+scholarship and history?)
+
+By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not Ben,
+as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of the
+Folio. {282b}  “If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the
+plays, he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the
+Folio, and the style of it” (stuffed with terms of law) “would be
+accounted for.”  Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote the Dedication;
+so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature.  “Legal terms
+abounded in all plays and poems of the period,” says Sir Sidney Lee, and
+Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word “all.” {283a}  However he says, “We
+must admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in
+lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan period—in sonnets for
+example, where it seems to us intolerable.”  Examples are given from
+Barnabe Barnes. {283b}  The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare
+does the legal style “more natural,” and more accurately than the rest.
+And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all, he
+would be sure to do it pretty well.
+
+For on this point of Will’s use of legal phraseology I frankly profess
+myself entirely at a loss.  To use it in poetry was part of the worse
+side of taste at that period.  The lawyers with one voice declare that
+Will’s use of it is copious and correct, and that their “mystery” is
+difficult, their jargon hard to master; “there is nothing so dangerous,”
+wrote Lord Campbell, “as for one not of the craft to tamper with our
+freemasonry.”  I have not tampered with it.  Perhaps a man of genius who
+found it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily
+than lawyers deem possible.  But Will, so accurate in his legal terms, is
+so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural
+history, and in classic lore.  Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally at
+sea as a naturalist.  On the habits of bees, for example, “his natural
+history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.” {284a}  Virgil,
+though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will.
+About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed.  His Natural History
+was folklore, or was taken from that great mediæval storehouse of
+absurdities, the popular work of Pliny.  “He went to contemporary error
+or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to nature,” says a critic quoted
+by Mr. Greenwood. {284b}  Was that worthy of Bacon?
+
+All these charges against _le vieux Williams_ (as Théophile Gautier calls
+our Will) I admit.  But Will was no Bacon; Will had not “taken all
+knowledge for his province.”  Bacon, I hope, had not neglected Bees!
+Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal terminology, and
+reckless of accuracy in quantity, in history, in classic matters, is not
+by me to be solved.  I can only surmise that from curiosity, or for some
+other unknown reason, he had read law-books, or drawn information from
+Templars about the meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was
+technically accurate.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian
+arguments against Will Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems.
+Their chief argument for Bacon is _aut Diabolus_, _aut Franciscus_,
+which, freely interpreted, means, “If Bacon is not the author, who the
+devil is?”
+
+We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are
+attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them,
+namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years
+of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place in
+the world of the drama.  His authorship is explicitly vouched for by his
+fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his
+will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben
+Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one
+of Henslowe’s “hands,” and lived into the Great Rebellion, knew the stage
+and authors for the stage from within, and _his_ “mellifluous
+Shakespeare” is “Will,” as his Beaumont was “Frank,” his Marlowe “Kit,”
+his Fletcher, “Jack.”  The author of _Daiphantus_ (1604), mentioning the
+popularity of _Hamlet_, styles it “one of friendly Shakespeare’s
+tragedies.”  Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known
+and friendly character.  The other authors of allusions did not need to
+say _who_ their “Shakespeare” was, any more than they needed to say _who_
+Marlowe or any other poet was.  We have examined the possibly
+unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention Shakespeare as
+the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also
+the actor.
+
+“But all may have been deceived” by the long conspiracy of the astute
+Bacon, or the Nameless One.  To believe this possible, considering the
+eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival playwrights, is to
+be credulous indeed.  The Baconians, representing Will almost as
+incapable of the use of pen and ink as “the old hermit of Prague,”
+destroy their own case.  A Will who had to make his mark, like his
+father, could not pose as an author even to the call-boy of his company.
+Mr. Greenwood’s bookless Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power
+of “bumbasting out a blank verse,” is a rather less impossible pretender,
+indeed; but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one,
+write blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses?
+Where are the “works” of Poet-Ape?  As to the man, even Will by
+tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was “a handsome, well-shaped man;
+very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant, smooth wit.”  To his
+fellow-actors he was “so worthy a friend and fellow” (associate).  To
+Jonson, “he was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an
+excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he
+flowed so freely that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.”
+If Jonson here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had
+that extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as
+remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is so
+characteristic of the style of Shakespeare’s plays.  In this prodigality
+he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; “panting Time toils
+after him in vain,” and even the reader, much more the listener, might
+say, _sufflaminandus est_; “he needs to have the brake put on.” {287a}
+
+Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will.  Only despair can
+venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare, Ben is
+here speaking of Bacon, as “falling into those things which could not
+escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous.”  But to this last poor
+shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and Baconians reduced.
+
+Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.
+
+But it is “impossible” that a man should have known so much, especially
+of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners and
+phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at a Latin
+school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty, the
+London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.
+
+“With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles of printed
+pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study
+furnished,” says a contemporary. {288a}  If a doubter will look at the
+cheap and common books of that day (a play in quarto, and the Sonnets of
+Shakespeare, when new, were sold for fippence) in any great collection;
+he will not marvel that to a lover of books, poor as he might be, many
+were accessible.  Such a man cannot be kept from books.
+
+If the reader will look into “the translations and imitations of the
+classics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love-pamphlets
+and plays of the University wits” (when these chanced to be printed),
+“the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,” {288b} he will
+understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare blossomed
+as rapidly as the flowers in “Adonis’ garden.”  The whole literature was,
+to an extent which we find tedious, saturated with classical myths,
+anecdotes, philosophic _dicta_—a world of knowledge of a kind then “in
+widest commonalty spread,” but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians
+and the public, such lore seems recondite learning.
+
+The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could get
+the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to “dispute their way through
+Europe,” made the Italian tour, and, notoriously, were “Italianate.”
+They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and Rome.
+Actors visited Denmark and Germany.  No man at home was far to seek for
+knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian “tranect or common ferry,”
+the gondolas, and the Rialto.  There was no lack of soldiers fresh and
+voluble from the foreign wars.  Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be
+surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some
+knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or
+Spanish.  That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod
+of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of
+his works.  For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly’s
+Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the
+houses of the great.  As to untaught nobility of manners, there came to
+the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village on the
+marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite grace,
+propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her: of her manners and
+swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant
+evidence.  Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic record is
+unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d’Arc.
+
+“_Ne me dites jamais cette bête de mot_, _impossible_,” said Napoleon: it
+is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.
+
+If intellectual “miracles” were impossible to genius, even Bacon could
+not have been and done all that he was and did, and also the author of
+the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not have been the
+scholar that he was.  For the rest, I need not return on my tracks and
+explain once more such shallow mysteries as the “Silence of Philip
+Henslowe,” and the lack of literary anecdotage about Shakespeare in a
+stupendously illiterate country town.  Had Will, not Ben, visited
+Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough of the kind
+desired.
+
+“We have the epics of Homer,” people say, “what matters it whether they
+be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business through seven
+centuries?  We have the plays of Shakespeare, what matters it whether he,
+or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?”
+
+It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries, such
+guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give love and
+praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Achæan “Father of the
+rest”; and to “friendly Shakespeare.”
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”
+
+
+TO myself _Troilus and Cressida_ is, with _Henry VI_, Part I, the most
+mysterious among the Shakespearean plays.  Here we find, if Will wrote
+it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern world in touch
+with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient world; but the
+English author’s eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust of post-Homeric
+perversions of the Tale of Troy.  The work of perversion began, we know,
+in the eighth century before our era, when, by the author of the
+_Cypria_, these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were
+represented as scoundrels, assassins, and cowards.
+
+In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer
+is no scholar.  He makes the Achæan fleet muster in “the port of
+_Athens_,” of all places.  Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-place,
+Aulis, in Bœotia.  (This Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.)  Six
+gates hath the Englishman’s Troy, and the Scæan is not one of them.
+
+The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are from
+the mediæval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer, whose Pandarus
+is only notable for loosing a traitor’s shaft at Menelaus, in time of
+truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede.  The play begins after
+the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus: in the play, not in
+Homer, Paris “retires hurt,” as is at first reported.  Hector has a
+special grudge against the Telamonian Aias.  As in the Iliad there is a
+view of the Achæans, taken from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the
+play, Pandarus and Cressida review the Trojans re-entering the city.
+Paris turns out not to be hurt after all.
+
+In Act i. Scene 3, the Achæans hold council, and regret the disaffection
+of Achilles.  Here comes Ulysses’ great speech on discipline, in armies,
+and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly thought to be a
+leaf in Shakespeare’s crown of bays.  The speeches of Agamemnon and
+Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats Agamemnon much more kindly
+than Homer is wont to do.  But the poet represents Achilles as laughing
+in his quarters at Patroclus’s imitation of the cough and other
+infirmities of old Nestor, to which Homer, naturally, never alludes.
+Throughout, the English poet regards Achilles with the eyes of his most
+infamous late Greek and ignorant mediæval detractors.  The Homeric
+sequence of events is so far preserved that, on the day of the duel
+between Paris and Menelaus, comes (through Æneas) the challenge by Hector
+to fight any Greek in “gentle and joyous passage of arms” (Iliad, VII).
+As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by
+the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on
+Aias.  In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as Porthos in _Les
+Trois Mousquetaires_.  The play makes him as great an eater of beef, and
+as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  Achilles, save in a passage quite out
+of accord with the rest of the piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is
+discourteous, and is cowardly!  No poet and no scholar who knew Homer’s
+heroes in Homer’s Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the
+revilings of Thersites are loathsome in their profusion of filthy
+thoughts.  It does not follow that Will did not write the part of
+Thersites.  Some of the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse
+adorn the play; one would say that no man but Will could have written
+them.  Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear “to dally with the
+innocence of love”; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the
+lines in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the
+Greek camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.  But
+the Homeric and the alien later elements,—the story of false love,—cannot
+be successfully combined.  The poet, whoever he was, appears to weary and
+to break down.  He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the death of
+Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while resting unarmed,
+without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of sumptuous mail from
+a nameless runaway.  In the play he has slain Patroclus, but has not
+stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which, in Homer, he is wearing.
+Achilles then meets Hector, but far from rushing to avenge on him
+Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters his men, and makes them
+surround and slay the defenceless Hector.
+
+Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a day
+becomes “the sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and of Diomede, and the
+comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid
+tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o’ love, and the
+base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector.  Yet there seemed
+to be muffled notes from the music, and broken lights from the splendour
+of Homer.  When Achilles eyes Hector all over, during a truce, and
+insultingly says that he is thinking in what part of his body he shall
+drive the spear, we are reminded of Iliad, XXII, 320–326, where Achilles
+searches his own armour, worn by Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him,
+and worn by Hector, for a chink in the mail.  Yet, after all, these
+points are taken, not from the Iliad, but from Caxton’s popular Troy
+Book.
+
+Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men to
+
+       “cry amain,
+    Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,”
+
+we think of Iliad, XXII, 390–393, where Achilles commands the Myrmidons
+to go singing the pæan
+
+    “Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!”
+
+The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls his
+winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus.  But, in fact, this
+passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from Caxton, except
+as regards the pæan.
+
+It may be worth noting that Chapman’s first instalment of his translation
+of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and VII–XI, appeared in 1598, and
+thence the author could adapt the passages from Iliad, Book VII.  In or
+about 1598–9 occurred, in _Histriomastix_, by Marston and others, a
+burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing Cressida, speaks of “thy
+knight,” who “_Shakes_ his furious _Speare_,” while in April 1599,
+Henslowe’s account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and
+Chettle for a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of Nottingham’s
+Company. {297a}  Of this play no more is known, nor can we be sure that
+Chapman’s seven Books of the Iliad (I, II, VII–XI) of 1598 attracted the
+attention of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to
+Trojan affairs.  The coincidences at least are curious.  If “_Shakes_ his
+furious _Speare_” in _Histriomastix_ refers to Shakespeare in connection
+with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker and Chettle were doing a _Troilus
+and Cressida_ for a company not Shakespeare’s, then there were _two
+Troilus and Cressida_ in the field.  A licence to print a _Troilus and
+Cressida_ was obtained in 1602–3, but the quarto of our play, the
+Shakespearean play, is of 1609, “as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain’s
+men,” that is, by Shakespeare’s Company.  Now Dekker and Chettle wrote,
+apparently, for Lord Nottingham’s Company.  One quarto of 1609 declares,
+in a Preface, that the play has “never been staled with the stage”;
+another edition of the same year, from the same publishers, has not the
+Preface, but declares that the piece “was acted by the King’s Majesty’s
+servants _at the Globe_.” {298a}  The author of the Preface (Ben Jonson,
+Mr. Greenwood thinks, {298b}) speaks only of a single author, who has
+written other admirable comedies.  “When he is gone, and his comedies out
+of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English
+Inquisition.”  Why?  The whole affair is a puzzle.  But if the author of
+the Preface is right about the single author of _Troilus and Cressida_,
+and if Shakespeare is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in
+_Histriomastix_ (1599), then it appears to me that Shakespeare, in
+1598–9, after Chapman’s portion of the Iliad appeared, was author of one
+_Troilus and Cressida_, extant in 1602–3 (when its publication was barred
+till the publisher “got authority”), while Chettle and Dekker, in April
+1599, were busy with another _Troilus and Cressida_, as why should they
+not be?  In an age so lax about copyright, if their play was of their own
+original making, are we to suppose that there was copyright in the names
+of the leading persons of the piece, Troilus and Cressida?
+
+   [Picture: London in the year 1610, showing the Globe Theatre in the
+                               Foreground]
+
+Perhaps not: but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge Stotsenburg’s
+opinion {298c} that Henslowe’s entries of April 1599 “refute the
+Shakespearean claim to the authorship of _Troilus and Cressida_,” which
+exhibits “the collaboration of two men,” as “leading commentators” hold
+that it does.  But the learned Judge mentions as a conceivable
+alternative that “there were two plays on the subject with the same
+name,” and, really, it looks as if there were!  The Judge does not agree
+“with Webb and other gifted writers that Bacon wrote this play.”  So far
+the Court is quite with him.  He goes on however, “It was, in my opinion,
+based on the foregoing facts, originally the production of Dekker and
+Chettle, added to and philosophically dressed by Francis Bacon.”  But,
+according to Mr. Greenwood, “it is admitted not only that the different
+writing of two authors is apparent in the Folio play, but also that
+‘Shakespeare’ must have had at least some share in a play of _Troilus and
+Cressida_ as early as the very year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker
+and Chettle are found engaged in writing their play of that name,” on the
+evidence of _Histriomastix_. {299a}  How that evidence proves that “a
+play of _Troilus and Cressida_ had been _published_ as by ‘Shakespeare’
+about 1599,” I know not.  Perhaps “published” means “acted”?  “And it is
+not unreasonable to suppose that this play” (“published as by
+Shakespeare”) “was the one to which Henslowe alludes”—as being written in
+April 1599, by Dekker and Chettle.
+
+If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker,
+Chettle, and “Shakespeare,” the Great Unknown, or Bacon.  He collaborates
+with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham’s men (according
+to Sir Sidney Lee), {300a} but it is, later at least, played by
+Shakespeare’s company; and perhaps Bacon gets none of the £4 paid {300b}
+to Dekker and Chettle.  Henslowe does not record his sale of the Dekker
+and Chettle play to Shakespeare’s or to any company or purchaser.
+Without an entry of the careful Henslowe recording his receipts for the
+sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser, it is not easy to
+see how Shakespeare’s company procured the manuscript, and thus enabled
+him to refashion it.  Perhaps no reader will fail to recognise his hand
+in the beautiful blank verse of many passages.  I am not familiar enough
+with the works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable
+passages.  Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo of Swift’s might poison with
+such phrases as his the name and nature of love, loyalty, and military
+courage.  But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he
+were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he may have
+written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim of “a
+daughter of the game,” and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the
+vanity of his cowardly Achilles.  If Shakespeare read the books
+translated by Chapman, he must have read them in the same spirit as
+Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry of the Achæan could not be
+combined with the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he knew
+them in the mediæval books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate and Caxton.
+The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not follow.  Probably Will
+looked on the play as one of his failures.  The Editor, if we can speak
+of an Editor, of the Folio clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly
+that it is not paged, and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.
+
+“The Grand Possessors” of the play referred to in the Preface to one of
+the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare’s Company.  In
+this case the owners would not permit the publication of the play if they
+could prevent it.  The title provokes Mr. Greenwood to say, “Why these
+worthies should be so styled is not apparent; indeed the supposition
+seems not a little ridiculous.” {301a}  Of course, if the players were
+the possessors, “grand” is merely a jeer, by a person advertising a
+successful piracy.  And in regard to Tieck’s conjecture that James I is
+alluded to as “the grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly
+written,” {301b} the autocratic James was very capable of protecting
+himself against larcenous publishers.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+CHETTLE’S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE
+
+
+IN discussing contemporary allusions to William Shakspere or Shakespeare
+(or however you spell the name), I have not relied on Chettle’s remarks
+(in _Kind-Hart’s Dreame_, 1592) concerning Greene’s _Groatsworth of Wit_.
+Chettle speaks of it, saying, “in which a letter, written to divers
+play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken.”  It appears
+that by “one or two” Chettle means _two_.  “With _neither_ of them that
+take offence was I acquainted” (at the time when he edited the
+_Groatsworth_), “and with one of them I care not if I never be.”  We do
+not know who “the Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance,” addressed by
+Greene, were.  They are usually supposed to have been Marlowe, Peele, and
+Lodge, or Nash.  We do not know which of the two who take offence is the
+man with whom Chettle did not care to be acquainted.  Of “the other,”
+according to Chettle, “myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than
+he is excellent in the quality he professes” (that is, “in his
+profession,” as we say), “besides divers of worship have reported his
+uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty; and his facetious grace
+in writing that approves his art.”
+
+Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the person of whom
+he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and (_apparently_) that he is
+“excellent in the quality he professes”—in his profession.  Speaking on
+the evidence of “divers of worship,” the same man is said to possess
+“facetious grace in writing.”  Had his writings been then published,
+Chettle, a bookish man, would have read them and formed his own opinion.
+Works of Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe had been published.  Writing is _not_
+“the quality he professes,” is not the “profession” of the man to whom
+Chettle refers.  On the other hand, the profession of Greene’s “Quondam
+acquaintance” _was_ writing, “they spend their wits in making Plays.”
+Thus the man who wrote, but whose profession was not that of writing,
+does not, so far, appear to have been one of those addressed by Greene.
+It seems undeniable that Greene addresses gentlemen who are “playmakers,”
+who “spend their wits in making Plays,” and who are _not_ actors; for
+Greene’s purpose is to warn them against the rich, ungrateful actors.  If
+Greene’s friends, at the moment when he wrote, were, or if any one of
+them then was, by profession an actor, Greene’s warning to him against
+actors, directed to an actor, is not, to me, intelligible.  But Mr.
+Greenwood writes, “As I have shown, George Peele was one of the
+playwrights addressed by Greene, and Peele was a successful player as
+well as playwright, and might quite truly have been alluded to both as
+having ‘facetious grace in writing,’ and being ‘excellent in the quality
+he professed,’ that is, as a professional actor.” {304a}
+
+I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of Oxford, had
+ever been a player, and a successful player.  But one may ask,—in 1592
+did George Peele “profess the quality” of an actor; was he then a
+professional actor, and only an occasional playwright?  If so, I am not
+apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not to put faith in the
+members of his own profession.  From them, as a successful member of
+their profession (a profession which, as Greene complains, “exploited”
+dramatic authors), Peele stood in no danger.  Thus I do not see how
+Chettle’s professional actor, reported to have facetious grace in
+writing, can be identified with Peele.  The identification seems to me
+impossible.  Peele and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary gentlemen; Lodge,
+in 1592, was filibustering, though a literary man; he had not yet become
+a physician.  In 1592, none of the three had any profession but that of
+literature, so far as I am aware.  The man who had a special profession,
+and also wrote, was not one of these three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere
+literary gentleman, pamphleteer and playwright.
+
+I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene addressed
+the _Groatsworth_, though the atheistic writer of tragedies seems meant,
+and disgracefully meant, for Marlowe.  I only know that Chettle is
+expressing his regrets for Greene’s language to some one whom he
+applauded as to his exercise of his profession; and who, according to
+“divers of worship,” had also “facetious grace in writing.”  “Myself have
+seen him no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes”;
+whether or not this means that Chettle has _seen_ his excellence in his
+profession, I cannot tell for certain; but Chettle’s remark is, at least,
+contrasted with what he gives merely from report—“the facetious grace in
+writing” of the man in question.  _His_ writing is not part of his
+profession, so he is not, in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge, Peele, Marlowe, or
+Nash.
+
+Who, then, is this mysterious personage?  Malone, Dyce, Steevens,
+Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse and
+Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere.  But Mr.
+Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose “mind” is “legal,” have pointed out that this
+weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere, if Greene meant
+Shakspere), attacked by Greene.  For Chettle says that in the
+_Groatsworth of Wit_ “a letter, written to divers play-makers, is
+offensively by one or two of them taken.”  The mysterious one is,
+therefore, one of the playwrights addressed by Greene.  Consequently all
+the followers of Malone, who wrote before Messrs. Fleay and Castle, are
+mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to say about Sir Sidney Lee, J. C.
+Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr. Gosse, in the way of moral reprobation,
+may be read by the curious in his pages. {305a}
+
+Meanwhile, if we take Chettle to have been a strict grammarian, by his
+words—“a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or
+two of them taken,” Will is excluded; the letter was most assuredly not
+written to _him_.  But I, whose mind is not legal, am not certain that
+Chettle does not mean that the letter, written to divers play-makers, was
+by one or two makers of plays offensively taken.
+
+This opinion seems the less improbable, as the person to whom Chettle is
+most apologetic excels in a quality or profession, which is contrasted
+with, and is not identical with, “his facetious grace in writing”—a
+_parergon_, or “ bye-work,” in his case.  Whoever this person was, he
+certainly was not Marlowe, Peele, Lodge, or Nash.  We must look for some
+other person who had a profession, and also was reported to have
+facetious grace in writing.
+
+If Chettle is to be held tight to grammar, Greene referred to some one
+unknown, some one who wrote for the stage, but had another profession.
+If Chettle is not to be thus tautly construed, I confess that to myself
+he seems to have had Shakspere, even Will, in his mind.  For Will in 1592
+had “a quality which he professed,” that of an actor; and also (I
+conceive) was reported to have “ facetious grace in writing.”  But other
+gentlemen may have combined these attributes; wherefore I lay no stress
+on the statements of Chettle, as if they referred to our Will Shakspere.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{0a}  E. J. Castle, _Shakespeare_, _Bacon_, _Jonson_, _and Greene_, pp.
+194–195.
+
+{0b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 145.
+
+{0c}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 340.
+
+{0d}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 340, 341.
+
+{0e}  _In Re Shakespeare_, p. 54.
+
+{0f}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 341.
+
+{0g}  _Ibid._, p. 470.
+
+{0h}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 339.
+
+{0i}  _The Vindicators of Shakespeare_, pp. 115–116.
+
+{0j}  _Ibid._, p. 49.
+
+{0k}  _The Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 14.
+
+{4a}  _Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare_.  By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.
+
+{7a}  _The Shakespere Problem Restated_, p. 293.
+
+{11a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 31–37.
+
+{13a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 36–37.
+
+{16a}  _Tue Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 20.
+
+{17a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 47–48.
+
+{17b}  _Ibid._, pp. 54–55.
+
+{17c}  _Ibid._, p. 54.
+
+{17d}  _Ibid._, p. 56.
+
+{17e}  _Ibid._, p. 59.
+
+{17f}  _Ibid._, p. 62.
+
+{17g}  _Ibid._, p. 193.
+
+{18a}  See his _Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 210.
+
+{19a}  _Vindicators_, p. 187.
+
+{19b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 223.
+
+{21a}  _In Re Shakespeare_, p. 54.
+
+{22a}  In a brief note of two pages (_Cornhill Magazine_, November 1911)
+he makes such reply as the space permits to a paper of my own,
+“Shakespeare or X?” in the September number.  With my goodwill he might
+have written thirty-two pages to my sixteen, but I am not the Editor, and
+never heard of Mr. Greenwood’s note till May 1912.
+
+He says that I had represented him as stating that the Unknown genius
+adopted the name of William Shake-speare or Shakespeare “as a good _nom
+de guerre_, without any reference to the fact that there was an actor in
+existence of the name of William Shakspere, whose name was sometimes
+written Shakespeare, and without the least idea that the works he
+published under this pseudonym would be fathered upon the actor . . . ”
+(My meaning has obviously been too obscurely stated by me.)
+
+Mr. Greenwood next writes that the confusion between the actor, and the
+unknown taking the name William Shakespeare, “did happen and was intended
+to happen.”
+
+_C’est là le miracle_!
+
+How could it happen if the actor were the bookless, ignorant man whom Mr.
+Greenwood describes?  It could not happen: Will must have been unmasked
+in a day.  The fact that a strange plot existed was only too obvious.
+The Unknown’s secret must have been tracked by the hounds of keenest nose
+in the packs of rival and jealous authors and of actors.  None gives
+tongue.
+
+{27a}  _Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare_, p. 37.
+
+{30a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 333.
+
+{31a}  In the passage which I quoted, with notes of omission, from Mr.
+Greenwood (p. 333), he went on to say that the eulogies of the poet by
+“some cultured critics of that day,” “afford no proof that the author who
+published under the name of Shakespeare was in reality Shakspere the
+Stratford player.”  That position I later contest.
+
+{31b}  See chap. XI, _The First Folio_.
+
+{33a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 305, 306.
+
+{34a}  Furness, _Merchant of Venice_, pp. 271, 272.
+
+{34b}  On this see Mr. Pollard’s _Shakespeare Folios and Quartos_, pp.
+1–9.
+
+{37a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 202, 348, 349.
+
+{38a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 349.
+
+{44a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 356.
+
+{45a}  _In Re Shakespeare_, p. 88, note I.
+
+{48a}  _Studies in Shakespeare_, p. 15; _Life of Shakespeare_, by Malone,
+pp. 561–2, 564; Appendix, XI, xvi.
+
+{50a}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, pp.
+97, 98.
+
+{51a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 44.
+
+{52a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 39.
+
+{52b}  _Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 210.
+
+{53a}  _Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 187.
+
+{53b}  _Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 223.
+
+{55a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 69.
+
+{56a}  See chapter X, _The Traditional Shakespeare_.
+
+{56b}  See C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_,
+pp. 48, 343–8.
+
+{57a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 207–9.
+
+{59a}  Chapter X, _infra._
+
+{62a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 96.
+
+{62b}  See chapter X, _The Traditional Shakespeare_.
+
+{62c}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 94–96.
+
+{64a}  _Shakespeare_, pp. 38–40.
+
+{65a}  Raleigh, _Shakespeare_, pp. 77, 78.
+
+{69a}  So he seems to me to do; but in _Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p.
+135, he shows great caution: “I refer the reader to Mr. Collin’s essay,
+and ask him to judge for himself.”
+
+{71a}  _Studies in Shakespeare_, p. 15.
+
+{72a}  _Studies in Shakespeare_, p. 21.
+
+{75a}  _Alcibiades_, I, pp. 132, 133; _Troilus_, III, scene 3.
+
+{77a}  _Studies in Shakespeare_, p. 46.
+
+{77b}  _Iliad_, p. 63.
+
+{91a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 54, 55.
+
+{93a}  _National Review_, vol. xxxix., 1902.
+
+{93b}  _The Pilot_, Aug. 30, 1902, p. 220.
+
+{96a}  The oldest mention of a _circulating_ library known to me is in
+Hull, in 1650, when Sir James Turner found it excellent.
+
+{97a}  In his _Shakespeare_ (_English Men of Letters_), pp. 66, 67.
+
+{97b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 77, 78.
+
+{97c}  _The Shakespearean Myth_, p. 162.
+
+{100a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 76.
+
+{101a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 81, note I.
+
+{103a}  Penzance, _The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy_, pp. 150, 151.
+Citing Appleton Morgan’s _Shakespearean Myth_, pp. 248, 298.
+
+{106a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 175.
+
+{107a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 457.
+
+{109a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 58.
+
+{109b}  _Apology the Actors_, 1612.
+
+{110a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 267.
+
+{111a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 267, 268.
+
+{112a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 50–52.
+
+{113a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 51.
+
+{113b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 51.
+
+{113c}  _Ibid._, p. 500, citing Mr. Reed’s _Francis Bacon our
+Shake-speare_, chap. ii. pp. 62, 63.
+
+{113d}  _Ibid._, pp. 500–520, chap xvi.
+
+{114a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 512.
+
+{114b}  _Ibid._, p. 514.
+
+{114c}  _Ibid._, p. 386, note I.
+
+{114d}  _Ibid._, p. 93.
+
+{120a}  _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. v. p. 126.  Prof.
+G. P. Baker.
+
+{121a}  Furness, _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, pp. xiii., 348–350: _cf._ pp.
+348, 349, for the four distinct styles of linguistic affectation of the
+period, at least as they are represented in literature.
+
+{121b}  _Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light_, Appendix on Marlowe.
+
+{124a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 516.
+
+{126a}  Act i.  Scene 2.  Furness, _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, p. 45, note.
+
+{127a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 67, 68.
+
+{129a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 66.
+
+{129b}  _Ibid._, p. 67.
+
+{136a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 307.
+
+{138a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 308.
+
+{140a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 309.
+
+{141a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 310.
+
+{141b}  _Ibid._, pp. 310, 311.
+
+{141c}  _Ibid._, p. 311.
+
+{142a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 309.
+
+{142b}  _Ibid._, pp. 311, 312.
+
+{143a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 312, 313.
+
+{145a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 313.
+
+{146a}  See Appendix II, “_Chettle’s supposed allusion to Will
+Shakspere_.”
+
+{147a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 330.
+
+{149a}  _The Vindicators of Shakespeare_, pp. 115, 116, 211.  _See_ my
+Introduction, p. xxii.
+
+{150a}  _The Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 210.
+
+{150b}  _Ibid._, p. 136.
+
+{151a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 338.
+
+{155a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 346.
+
+{157a}  Cited in _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 353.
+
+{159a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 353.
+
+{159b}  _Diary_, pp. xxvii, xxviii.
+
+{160a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 367.
+
+{160b}  _Ibid._, pp. 368, 369.
+
+{161a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 354.
+
+{163a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 366.
+
+{164a}  Some Baconians say so!
+
+{171a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 181, 397.
+
+{171b}  _Ibid._, p. 186.
+
+{174a}  Some verses of Fletcher’s may, perhaps, refer to Beaumont’s
+death.
+
+{175a}  C. I. Elton, _Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, pp. 246,
+247.
+
+{175b}  As to the Aldine Ovid in the Bodleian, see Mr. Greenwood in _The
+Vindicators of Shakespeare_, pp. 191, 192.  Of course he raises every
+objection, but I do not feel sure that either an affirmative or negative
+result can be attained by _expertise_.  We are not told when or where the
+Bodleian obtained the book; nor what is the date of the handwriting of
+the inscription about W. Hall, a personage whom we are to meet later.  A
+good deal of business is done in forging names in books.
+
+{176a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 196.
+
+{176b}  _Ibid._, p. 197.
+
+{177a}  See _Frontispiece_.
+
+{179a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 247, 248, note I.
+
+{180a}  _National Review_, June 1912, p. 903.
+
+{180b}  _Pall Mall Gazette_, November 1910.
+
+{181a}  _Outlines_, vol. i. p. 283.
+
+{182a}  P. 73, 1806.
+
+{183a}  _Outlines_, vol. i. p. 283.
+
+{183b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 247.
+
+{186a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 248–249.
+
+{186b}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, pp.
+236–237.
+
+{187a}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, p.
+228.
+
+{187b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 199.
+
+{187c}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, pp.
+332–333.
+
+{187d}  _Ibid._, p. 250.
+
+{188a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 199, note 1.
+
+{189a}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, pp.
+339, 342.
+
+{190a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 238.
+
+{198a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 214.
+
+{200a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 214, note 2.
+
+{201a}  C. I. Elton, _William Shakespeare_, _His Family and Friends_, p.
+56.
+
+{201b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 28, 29.
+
+{207a}  Like Mr. Greenwood, I think that Ben was the penman.
+
+{208a}  Pollard, _ut supra_, p. 10.
+
+{210a}  Pollard, _ut supra_, pp. 64–80.
+
+{215a}  Pollard, _ut supra_, pp. 121–124.
+
+{216a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 287–288.
+
+{217a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 290–291.
+
+{217b}  _Ibid._, pp. 292, 293.
+
+{218a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 293.
+
+{219a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 489, 490.
+
+{219b}  _Ibid._, p. 491.
+
+{219c}  _Studies in Shakespeare_, p. 352.
+
+{220a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 293.
+
+{220b}  _Ibid._, p. 491.
+
+{220c}  _Ibid._, p. 293.
+
+{220d}  _Ibid._, p. 293.
+
+{221a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 297.
+
+{221b}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 297.
+
+{222a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 293.
+
+{222b}  _Ibid._, p. 351.
+
+{222c}  _Ibid._, p. 351.
+
+{222d}  _Ibid._, pp. 290, 293.
+
+{222e}  _Ibid._, pp. 351, 358.
+
+{223a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 351.
+
+{223b}  _Ibid._, pp. 290, 293.
+
+{223c}  _Ibid._, p. 351.
+
+{223d}  _Ibid._, p. 351.
+
+{223e}  _Ibid._, pp. 290, 293.
+
+{223f}  _Ibid._, p. 290.
+
+{223g}  _Ibid._, pp. 290, 291.
+
+{223h}  _Ibid._, p. 293.
+
+{224a} _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 351.
+
+{224b}  _Ibid._, p. 358.
+
+{224c}  _Ibid._, pp. 351, 358.
+
+{224d}  _Ibid._, p. 290.
+
+{224e}  _Ibid._, p. 293.
+
+{225a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 355, 356.
+
+{226a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 355, 356.
+
+{226b}  _Ibid._, pp. 158, 160, 162 (“not the original author”), 170.
+
+{226c}  _Ibid._, pp. 130–151, 160, 168.
+
+{226d}  _Ibid._, p., 123, note 2.
+
+{227a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 356.
+
+{228a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 160.
+
+{228b}  _Ibid._, p. 356.
+
+{228c}  _Ibid._, p. 160.
+
+{228d}  _Ibid._, p. 356.
+
+{228e}  _Ibid._, pp. 290, 293.
+
+{228f}  _Ibid._, p. 358.
+
+{229a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 365.  I will bet Mr.
+Greenwood any sum not exceeding half a crown that he cannot find any
+“records of the writing of” either of these plays in Henslowe’s
+“Diary,”—his account book of expenses and receipts.
+
+{229b}  _Ibid._, p. 365.
+
+{229c}  _Ibid._, p. 365.
+
+{229d}  _Ibid._, p. 160.
+
+{231a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 276.
+
+{231b}  _Ibid._, p. 290.
+
+{232a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 293.
+
+{232b}  _Ibid._, p. 294.
+
+{233a}  _The Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 57 (1911).
+
+{237a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 453.
+
+{244a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 466.
+
+{245a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 313.
+
+{245b}  _Supra_, p. 143.
+
+{245c}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 466.
+
+{249a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 482.
+
+{250a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 467, 471.
+
+{250b}  See chapter IX on _The Later Life of Shakespeare_.
+
+{250c}  _Ibid._, pp. 472, 474.
+
+{251a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 473.
+
+{251b}  _Ibid._, p. 474.
+
+{253a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 475.
+
+{254a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 106.
+
+{255a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 478.
+
+{258a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 480.
+
+{259a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 483.
+
+{260a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 483.
+
+{260b}  _Ibid._, pp. 489–490.
+
+{260c}  See chapter XI, _The First Folio_.
+
+{261a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 483.
+
+{261b}  _Ibid._, pp. 489–491.
+
+{262a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 486.
+
+{264a} _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 488.
+
+{266a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 491.
+
+{267a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 295, _cf._ p. 499.
+
+{268a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 295, 499.
+
+{270a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 499.
+
+{274a}  _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 4 (1861).
+
+{275a}  _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 31.
+
+{275b}  _Ibid._, vol. i. pp. 74–95.
+
+{276a}  _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. pp. 108–109.
+
+{279a}  _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 106.
+
+{279b}  _Ibid._, vol. i. pp. 121–143.
+
+{280a}  Sixty pages in Spedding’s _Letters and Life of Francis Bacon_,
+vol. i. pp. 146–208.
+
+{281a}  See his statement (1603), Spedding, iii. pp. 84–87.
+
+{281b}  _Ibid._, iii. p. 253.
+
+{282a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 371–406.
+
+{282b}  _The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy_, p. 198.
+
+{283a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 391.
+
+{283b}  _Ibid._, pp. 408–410.
+
+{284a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 425.
+
+{284b}  _Ibid._, p. 431.
+
+{287a}  _Sufflamen_ is the “drag” or “brake.”  Ben’s, “it was necessary
+he should be _stopped_,” is an incorrect translation.
+
+{288a}  Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, _Shakespeare_, p. 65.
+
+{288b}  _Ibid._, p. 65.
+
+{297a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 358–362.
+
+{298a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 491–494.
+
+{298b}  _Ibid._, p. 495.
+
+{298c}  _Ibid._, pp. 358–360.
+
+{299a} _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 361.
+
+{300a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 360.
+
+{300b}  _Ibid._, p. 358.
+
+{301a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, p. 495, note I.
+
+{301b}  _Ibid._, p. 494.
+
+{304a}  _Vindicators of Shakespeare_, p. 69.
+
+{305a}  _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, pp. 317–319.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT
+UNKNOWN***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 5127-0.txt or 5127-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/5/1/2/5127
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/5127-0.zip b/5127-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba6fe41
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-0.zip
diff --git a/5127-h.zip b/5127-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fcb6e38
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h.zip
diff --git a/5127-h/5127-h.htm b/5127-h/5127-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c464a95
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/5127-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,9570 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html
+     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, by Andrew Lang</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    P {  margin-top: .75em;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    P.gutsumm { margin-left: 5%;}
+    P.poetry {margin-left: 3%; }
+    .GutSmall { font-size: 0.7em; }
+    H1, H2 {
+         text-align: center;
+		margin-top: 2em;
+		margin-bottom: 2em;
+         }
+    H3, H4, H5 {
+	text-align: center;
+	margin-top: 1em;
+	margin-bottom: 1em;
+	}
+    BODY{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+ table { border-collapse: collapse; }
+table {margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;}
+    td { vertical-align: top; border: 1px solid black;}
+    td p { margin: 0.2em; }
+    .blkquot  {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */
+
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .pagenum {position: absolute;
+               left: 92%;
+               font-size: small;
+               text-align: right;
+		font-weight: normal;
+               color: gray;
+               }
+    img { border: none; }
+    img.dc { float: left; width: 50px; height: 50px; }
+    p.gutindent { margin-left: 2em; }
+    div.gapspace { height: 0.8em; }
+    div.gapline { height: 0.8em; width: 100%; border-top: 1px solid;} 
+    div.gapmediumline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%;
+                  border-top: 1px solid; }
+    div.gapmediumdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 40%; margin-left:30%;
+		  border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;}
+     div.gapshortdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%;
+                  margin-left: 40%; border-top: 1px solid;
+                  border-bottom: 1px solid; }
+    div.gapdoubleline { height: 0.3em; width: 50%;
+                  margin-left: 25%; border-top: 1px solid;
+                  border-bottom: 1px solid;}
+    div.gapshortline { height: 0.3em; width: 20%; margin-left:40%;
+		  border-top: 1px solid; }
+    .citation {vertical-align: super;
+               font-size: .8em;
+               text-decoration: none;}
+    img.floatleft { float: left;
+			margin-right: 1em;
+			margin-top: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; }
+    img.floatright { float: right;
+			margin-left: 1em; margin-top: 0.5em;
+			margin-bottom: 0.5em; }
+    img.clearcenter {display: block;
+			margin-left: auto;
+			margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0.5em;
+			margin-bottom: 0.5em}
+    -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, by
+Andrew Lang
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 7, 2015  [eBook #5127]
+[This file was first posted on May 5, 2002]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT
+UNKNOWN***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fpb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Shakespeare&rsquo;s Monument at Stratford-on-Avon
+(1616&ndash;1623?)"
+title=
+"Shakespeare&rsquo;s Monument at Stratford-on-Avon
+(1616&ndash;1623?)"
+ src="images/fps.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>SHAKESPEARE<br />
+BACON<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN</span></h1>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+ANDREW LANG</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">WITH EIGHT
+ILLUSTRATIONS</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA</span><br
+/>
+1912</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">All rights
+reserved</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pagev"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. v</span><span class="GutSmall">TO</span><br />
+HORACE HOWARD FURNESS<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">IN MEMORY OF AN</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">OLD PROMISE</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vii</span>PREFACE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is with some hesitation that I
+give my husband&rsquo;s last book to the world.&nbsp; It was in
+type when he died, but he had no time to correct even the first
+proofs, and doubtless he would have made many changes, if not in
+his views at least in his expression of them.&nbsp; Mr. Bartram
+has verified the quotations and dates with infinite care, and for
+this he has my warmest thanks.&nbsp; For the rest I can but ask
+those who differ from the author to remember the circumstances in
+which the work has been published.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">L. B. L.</p>
+<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+ix</span>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#pagexiii">xiii</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Baconian and Anti-Willian
+Positions</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The &ldquo;Silence&rdquo; about
+Shakespeare</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">That Impossible He&mdash;The Schooling
+of Shakespeare</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Mr. Collins on Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+Learning</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Shakespeare, Genius, and
+Society</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page83">83</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Courtly Plays: &ldquo;Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost&rdquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page119">119</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Contemporary Recognition of Will as
+Author</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page133">133</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">The Silence of Philip
+Henslowe</span>&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Later Life of
+Shakespeare&mdash;His Monument and Portraits</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page167">167</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">The Traditional
+Shakspere</span>&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The First Folio</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Ben Jonson and Shakespeare</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page235">235</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Preoccupations of Bacon</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page271">271</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Appendix I.&mdash;&ldquo;Troilus and
+Cressida&rdquo;</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page293">293</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Appendix II.&mdash;Chettle&rsquo;s
+Supposed Allusion to Will Shakspere</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page302">302</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pagexi"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xi</span>LIST
+OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Shakespeare&rsquo;s Monument at
+Stratford-on-Avon</span> (1616&ndash;1623?)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><i>Frontispiece</i></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Copy of the title-page of
+&ldquo;Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</span>,&rdquo;
+1598.&nbsp; The earliest title-page in which Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+name is given as the author of the work.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>From</i> J. O. <span
+class="smcap">Halliwell-Phillipps</span>&rsquo; <i>Outlines of
+the Life of Shakespeare</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Facsimile of the Autograph Signature
+&ldquo;By me William Shakspeare</span>.&rdquo;&nbsp; From one of
+the Three Sheets of his Will, dated <i>March</i> 25, 1616.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>From</i> <span class="smcap">Sir
+Sidney Lee&rsquo;s</span> <i>Shakespeare&rsquo;s Life and
+Work</i>.&nbsp; <i>By permission of</i> Messrs. <span
+class="smcap">Smith</span>, <span class="smcap">Elder</span>
+&amp; Co.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Facsimile of Mark-Signature of John
+Shakespeare</span>, <span class="smcap">the Poet&rsquo;s
+Father</span>.&nbsp; From a Deed of Conveyance, dated
+<i>January</i> 26, 1596</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>From</i> J. O. <span
+class="smcap">Halliwell-Phillipps</span>&rsquo; <i>Outlines of
+the Life of Shakespeare</i></p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Facsimile of Mark-Signature of Judith
+Shakespeare</span>, <span class="smcap">the Poet&rsquo;s Second
+Daughter, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Quiney</span></p>
+<p><i>From</i> J. O. <span
+class="smcap">Halliwell-Phillipps</span>&rsquo; <i>Outlines of
+the Life of Shakespeare</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page47">47</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xii</span><span class="smcap">The Monument in Dugdale&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;History of the Antiquities of Warwickshire</span>&rdquo;
+(1656)</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>With permission of</i> <span
+class="smcap">John Murray</span>, Esq.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">The Carew Monument in Stratford
+Church</span></p>
+<p><span class="smcap">The Carew Monument as Represented in
+Dugdale&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of the Antiquities of
+Warwickshire</span>&rdquo; (1656)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page181">181</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">From Vertue&rsquo;s Engraving of the
+Monument</span> (1725)</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>With permission of</i> <span
+class="smcap">John Murray</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Esq</span>.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">London in the year 1610, showing the
+Globe Theatre in the Foreground</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>From</i> J. O. <span
+class="smcap">Halliwell-Phillipps</span>&rsquo; <i>Outlines of
+the Life of Shakespeare</i></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page298">298</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="pagexiii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xiii</span>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> theory that Francis Bacon was,
+in the main, the author of &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays,&rdquo; has now been for fifty years before the learned
+world.&nbsp; Its advocates have met with less support than they
+had reason to expect.&nbsp; Their methods, their logic, and their
+hypotheses closely resemble those applied by many British and
+foreign scholars to Homer; and by critics of the very Highest
+School to Holy Writ.&nbsp; Yet the Baconian theory is universally
+rejected in England by the professors and historians of English
+literature; and generally by students who have no profession save
+that of Letters.&nbsp; The Baconians, however, do not lack the
+countenance and assistance of highly distinguished persons, whose
+names are famous where those of mere men of letters are unknown;
+and in circles where the title of &ldquo;Professor&rdquo; is not
+duly respected.</p>
+<p>The partisans of Bacon aver (or one of them avers) that
+&ldquo;Lord Penzance, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Palmerston, Judge
+Webb, Judge Holmes (of Kentucky, U.S.), Prince Bismarck, John
+Bright, and innumerable most <i>thoughtful scholars eminent in
+many walks of life</i>, <i>and especially in </i><a
+name="pagexiv"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xiv</span><i>the
+legal profession</i> . . . &rdquo; have been Baconians, or, at
+least, opposed to Will Shakspere&rsquo;s authorship.&nbsp; To
+these names of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel
+Clemens, D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark
+Twain.&nbsp; Dr. Clemens was, indeed, no mean literary critic;
+witness his epoch-making study of Prof. Dowden&rsquo;s <i>Life of
+Shelley</i>, while his researches into the biography of Jeanne
+d&rsquo;Arc were most conscientious.</p>
+<p>With the deepest respect for the political wisdom and literary
+taste of Lord Palmerston, Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and
+the late Mr. John Bright; and with every desire to humble myself
+before the judicial verdicts of Judges Holmes, Webb, and Lord
+Penzance; with sincere admiration of my late friend, Dr. Clemens,
+I cannot regard them as, in the first place and professionally,
+trained students of literary history.</p>
+<p>They were no more specially trained students of Elizabethan
+literature than myself; they were amateurs in this province, as I
+am an amateur, who differ from all of them in opinion.&nbsp;
+Difference of opinion concerning points of literary history ought
+not to make &ldquo;our angry passions rise.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet this
+controversy has been extremely bitter.</p>
+<p>I abstain from quoting the &ldquo;sweetmeats,&rdquo; in
+Captain MacTurk&rsquo;s phrase, which have been exchanged by the
+combatants.&nbsp; Charges of ignorance and monomania have been
+answered <a name="pagexv"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xv</span>by charges of forgery, lying, &ldquo;scandalous literary
+dishonesty,&rdquo; and even inaccuracy.&nbsp; Now no mortal is
+infallibly accurate, but we are all sane and &ldquo;indifferent
+honest.&rdquo;&nbsp; There have been forgeries in matters
+Shakespearean, alas, but not in connection with the Baconian
+controversy.</p>
+<p>It is an argument of the Baconians, and generally of the
+impugners of good Will&rsquo;s authorship of the plays vulgarly
+attributed to him, that the advocates of William Shakspere, Gent,
+as author of the plays, differ like the Kilkenny cats among
+themselves on many points.&nbsp; All do not believe, with Mr. J.
+C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles, Euripides, and
+&AElig;schylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr. Swinburne
+did, or knew them at all&mdash;for that matter.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard
+differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the
+First Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are with Mr.
+Pollard.&nbsp; Few, if any, partisans of Will agree with Mrs.
+Stopes (herself no Baconian) about the history of the Stratford
+monument of the poet.&nbsp; About Will&rsquo;s authorship of
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i>, and <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I, the friends
+of Will, like the friends of Bacon, are at odds among
+themselves.&nbsp; These and other divergencies of opinion cause
+the Baconians to laugh, as if <i>they</i> were a harmonious
+circle . . . !&nbsp; For the Baconian camp is not less divided
+against itself than the camp of the
+&ldquo;Stratfordians.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not all Baconians hold that
+Bacon was the legitimate son of &ldquo;that Imperial <a
+name="pagexvi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xvi</span>votaress&rdquo; Queen Elizabeth.&nbsp; Not all believe
+in the Cryptogram of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, or in any other
+cryptograms.&nbsp; Not all maintain that Bacon, in the Sonnets,
+was inspired by a passion for the Earl of Essex, for Queen
+Elizabeth, or for an early miniature of himself.&nbsp; Not all
+regard him as the author of the plays of Kit Marlowe.&nbsp; Not
+all suppose him to be a Rosicrucian, who possibly died at the age
+of a hundred and six, or, perhaps, may be &ldquo;still
+running.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not all aver that he wrote thirteen plays
+before 1593.&nbsp; But one party holds that, in the main, Will
+was the author of the plays, while the other party votes for
+Bacon&mdash;or for Bungay, a Great Unknown.&nbsp; I use Bungay as
+an endearing term for the mysterious being who was the Author if
+Francis Bacon was not.&nbsp; Friar Bungay was the rival of Friar
+Bacon, as the Unknown (if he was not Francis Bacon) is the rival
+of &ldquo;the inventor of Inductive reasoning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I could never have expected that I should take a part in this
+controversy; but acquaintance with <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i> (503 pp.), (1908), and later works of Mr. G. G.
+Greenwood, M.P., has tempted me to enter the lists.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is
+learned (and I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and
+Judge Holmes were rather ignorant).&nbsp; He is not over
+&ldquo;the threshold of Eld&rdquo; (as were Judge Webb and Lord
+Penzance when they took up Shakespearean criticism).&nbsp; <a
+name="pagexvii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xvii</span>His
+knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly superior to mine,
+for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s words, as &ldquo;a
+belletristic trifler.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge
+of legal evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not
+&ldquo;hold a brief for Bacon&rdquo; as the author of the
+Shakespearean plays and poems, and does not value Baconian
+cryptograms.&nbsp; In the following chapters I make endeavours,
+conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of Mr.
+Greenwood.&nbsp; It is a negative theory.&nbsp; He denies that
+Will Shakspere (or Shaxbere, or Shagspur, and so on) was the
+author of the plays and poems.&nbsp; Some other party was, <i>in
+the main</i>, with other hands, the author.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+cannot, or does not, offer a guess as to who this ingenious
+Somebody was.&nbsp; He does not affirm, and he does not deny,
+that Bacon had a share, greater or less, in the undertaking.</p>
+<p>In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every
+argument; to traverse every field.&nbsp; In philology I am all
+unlearned, and cannot pretend to discuss the language of
+Shakespeare, any more than I can analyse the language of Homer
+into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so on.&nbsp; Again, I cannot
+pretend to have an opinion, based on internal evidence, about the
+genuine Shakespearean character of such plays as <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i>, <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I, and <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>.&nbsp; About them different views are held
+<i>within</i> both camps.</p>
+<p><a name="pagexviii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xviii</span>I
+am no lawyer or naturalist (as Partridge said, <i>Non omnia
+possumus omnes</i>), and cannot imagine why our Author is so
+accurate in his frequent use of terms of law&mdash;if he be Will;
+and so totally at sea in natural history&mdash;if he be Francis,
+who &ldquo;took all knowledge for his province.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How can a layman pretend to deal with Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+legal attainments, after he has read the work of the learned
+Recorder of Bristol, Mr. Castle, K.C.?&nbsp; To his legal mind it
+seems that in some of Will&rsquo;s plays he had the aid of an
+expert in law, and then his technicalities were correct.&nbsp; In
+other plays he had no such tutor, and then he was sadly to seek
+in his legal jargon.&nbsp; I understand Mr. Greenwood to disagree
+on this point.&nbsp; Mr. Castle says, &ldquo;I think Shakespeare
+would have had no difficulty in getting aid from several
+sources.&nbsp; There is therefore no <i>prima facie</i> reason
+why we should suppose the information was supplied by
+Bacon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course there is not!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In fact, there are some reasons why one should
+attribute the legal assistance, say, to Coke, rather than to
+Bacon.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The truth is, that Bacon seems not to have been lawyer enough
+for Will&rsquo;s purposes.&nbsp; &ldquo;We have no reason to
+believe that Bacon was particularly well read in the
+technicalities of our law; he never seems to have seriously
+followed his profession.&rdquo; <a name="citation0a"></a><a
+href="#footnote0a" class="citation">[0a]</a></p>
+<p><a name="pagexix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xix</span>Now
+we have Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s testimonial in favour of Mr.
+Castle, &ldquo;Who really does know something about law.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation0b"></a><a href="#footnote0b"
+class="citation">[0b]</a>&nbsp; Mr. Castle thinks that Bacon
+really did not know enough about law, and suggests Sir Edward
+Coke, of all human beings, as conceivably Will&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;coach&rdquo; on legal technicalities.&nbsp; Perhaps Will
+consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury on theological
+niceties?</p>
+<p><i>Que s&ccedil;ais je</i>?&nbsp; In some plays, says Mr.
+Castle, Will&rsquo;s law is all right, in other plays it is all
+wrong.&nbsp; As to Will&rsquo;s law, when Mr. Greenwood and Mr.
+Castle differ, a layman dare not intervene.</p>
+<p>Concerning legend and tradition about our Will, it seems that,
+in each case, we should do our best to trace the <i>Quellen</i>,
+to discover the original sources, and the steps by which the tale
+arrived at its late recorders in print; and then each man&rsquo;s
+view as to the veracity of the story will rest on his sense of
+probability; and on his bias, his wish to believe or to
+disbelieve.</p>
+<p>There exists, I believe, only one personal anecdote of Will,
+the actor, and on it the Baconians base an argument against the
+contemporary recognition of him as a dramatic author.&nbsp; I
+take the criticism of Mr. Greenwood (who is not a
+Baconian).&nbsp; One John Manningham, Barrister-at-Law, &ldquo;a
+well-educated and cultured man,&rdquo; notes in his Diary
+(February 2, 1601) that &ldquo;at our feast we had a play called
+Twelve Night or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or
+Men&aelig;chmi <a name="pagexx"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xx</span>in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian
+called <i>Inganni</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; He confides to his Diary the
+tricks played on Malvolio as &ldquo;a good practice.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation0c"></a><a href="#footnote0c"
+class="citation">[0c]</a>&nbsp; That is all.</p>
+<p>About the authorship he says nothing: perhaps he neither knew
+nor cared who the author was.&nbsp; In our day the majority of
+people who tell me about a play which they have seen, cannot tell
+me the name of the author.&nbsp; Yet it is usually printed on the
+playbill, though in modest type.&nbsp; The public does not care a
+straw about the author&rsquo;s name, unless he be deservedly
+famous for writing letters to the newspapers on things in
+general; for his genius as an orator; his enthusiasm as a
+moralist, or in any other extraneous way.&nbsp; Dr. Forman in his
+queer account of the plot of &ldquo;Mack Beth&rdquo; does not
+allude to the name of the author (April 20, 1610).&nbsp;
+<i>Twelfth Night</i> was not published till 1623, in the Folio:
+there was no quarto to enlighten Manningham about the
+author&rsquo;s name.&nbsp; We do not hear of printed playbills,
+with author&rsquo;s names inserted, at that period.&nbsp; It
+seems probable that occasional playgoers knew and cared no more
+about authors than they do at present.&nbsp; The world of the
+wits, the critics (such as Francis Meres), poets, playwrights,
+and players, did know and care about the authors; apparently
+Manningham did not.&nbsp; But he heard a piquant anecdote of two
+players and (March 13, 1601) inserted it in his Diary.</p>
+<p><a name="pagexxi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xxi</span>Shakespeare once anticipated Richard Burbage at an
+amorous tryst with a citizen&rsquo;s wife.&nbsp; Burbage had, by
+the way, been playing the part of Richard III.&nbsp; While Will
+was engaged in illicit dalliance, the message was brought (what a
+moment for bringing messages!) that Richard III was at the door,
+and Will &ldquo;caused return to be made that William the
+Conqueror was before Richard III.&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+name William</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; (My italics.)&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+argues that if &ldquo;Shakspere the player was known to the world
+as the author of the plays of Shakespeare, it does seem extremely
+remarkable&rdquo; that Manningham should have thought it needful
+to add &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s name William.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation0d"></a><a href="#footnote0d"
+class="citation">[0d]</a></p>
+<p>But <i>was</i> &ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo; or any man,
+&ldquo;known to the world as the author of the plays of
+Shakespeare&rdquo;?&nbsp; No! for Mr. Greenwood writes,
+&ldquo;nobody, outside a very small circle, troubled his head as
+to who the dramatist or dramatists might be.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation0e"></a><a href="#footnote0e"
+class="citation">[0e]</a>&nbsp; To that &ldquo;very small
+circle&rdquo; we have no reason to suppose that Manningham
+belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that <i>Twelfth
+Night</i> resembles the <i>Men&aelig;chmi</i>.&nbsp;
+Consequently, it is <i>not</i> &ldquo;extremely remarkable&rdquo;
+that Manningham wrote &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s name
+William,&rdquo; to explain to posterity the joke about
+&ldquo;William the Conqueror,&rdquo; instead of saying,
+&ldquo;the brilliant author of the Twelfth Night play which so
+much amused me at <a name="pagexxii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xxii</span>our feast a few weeks ago.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation0f"></a><a href="#footnote0f"
+class="citation">[0f]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;Remarkable&rdquo; out of
+all hooping it would have been had Manningham written in the
+style of Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; But Manningham apparently did not
+&ldquo;trouble his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists
+might be.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Nobody, outside a very small
+circle,&rdquo; <i>did</i> trouble his poor head about that
+point.&nbsp; Yet Mr. Greenwood thinks &ldquo;it does seem
+extremely remarkable&rdquo; that Manningham did not mention the
+author.</p>
+<p>Later, on the publication of the Folio (1623), the world seems
+to have taken more interest in literary matters.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood says that then while &ldquo;the multitude&rdquo; would
+take Ben Jonson&rsquo;s noble panegyric on Shakespeare as a poet
+&ldquo;<i>au pied de la lettre</i>,&rdquo; &ldquo;the enlightened
+few would recognise that it had an esoteric meaning.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation0g"></a><a href="#footnote0g"
+class="citation">[0g]</a>&nbsp; Then, it seems, &ldquo;the
+world&rdquo;&mdash;the &ldquo;multitude&rdquo;&mdash;regarded the
+actor as the author.&nbsp; Only &ldquo;the enlightened few&rdquo;
+were aware that when Ben <i>said</i> &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Swan of Avon,&rdquo; he <i>meant</i>&mdash;somebody
+else.</p>
+<p>Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by
+persons of different mental conditions.&nbsp; For example, in
+1635 or 1636, Cuthbert Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous
+actor, Will&rsquo;s comrade, petitioned Lord Pembroke, then Lord
+Chamberlain, for consideration in a quarrel about certain
+theatres.&nbsp; Telling the history of <a
+name="pagexxiii"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xxiii</span>the
+houses, he mentions that the Burbages &ldquo;to ourselves joined
+those deserving men, Shakspere, Heminge, Condell, Phillips and
+others.&rdquo;&nbsp; Cuthbert is arguing his case solely from the
+point of the original owners or lease-holders of the houses, and
+of the well-known actors to whom they joined themselves.&nbsp;
+Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood think that &ldquo;it does indeed
+seem strange . . . that the proprietor[s] of the playhouses which
+had been made famous by the production of the Shakespearean
+plays, should, in 1635&mdash;twelve years after the publication
+of the great Folio&mdash;describe their reputed author to the
+survivor of the Incomparable Pair, as merely a
+&lsquo;man-player&rsquo; and &lsquo;a deserving
+man.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; Why did he not remind the Lord
+Chamberlain that this &ldquo;deserving man&rdquo; was the author
+of all these famous dramas?&nbsp; Was it because he was aware
+that the Earl of Pembroke &ldquo;knew better than that&rdquo;? <a
+name="citation0h"></a><a href="#footnote0h"
+class="citation">[0h]</a></p>
+<p>These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof
+positive of their case.</p>
+<p>Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of
+what the Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated,
+in 1623, to him and his brother, by Will&rsquo;s friends, Heminge
+and Condell, as they had been patrons of the late William
+Shakspere and admirers of his plays.&nbsp; The terms of this
+dedication are to be cited in the text, later.&nbsp; <i>We</i>
+all <i>now</i> would have reminded the Earl of what he very well
+knew.&nbsp; Cuthbert did not.</p>
+<p><a name="pagexxiv"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xxiv</span>The
+intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will
+read pp. 481&ndash;484 in <i>William Shakespeare</i>, <i>His
+Family and Friends</i>, by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of
+White Staunton.&nbsp; Cuthbert was a puzzle-pated old boy.&nbsp;
+The silence as to Will&rsquo;s authorship on the part of this
+muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635&ndash;36, cannot outweigh the
+explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed
+by his friends and fellow-actors in 1623.</p>
+<p>Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for
+the affirmative to negative evidence from silence, the silence of
+Cuthbert Burbage.</p>
+<p>One may read through Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s three books and
+note the engaging varieties of his views; they vary as suits his
+argument; but he is unaware of it, or can justify his
+varyings.&nbsp; Thus, in 1610, one John Davies wrote rhymes in
+which he speaks of &ldquo;our English Terence, Mr. Will
+Shakespeare&rdquo;; &ldquo;good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp; In his period
+patriotic English critics called a comic dramatist &ldquo;the
+English Terence,&rdquo; or &ldquo;the English Plautus,&rdquo;
+precisely as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant &ldquo;the
+American Wordsworth,&rdquo; or Cooper &ldquo;the American
+Scott&rdquo;; and as Scots called the Rev. Mr. Thomson &ldquo;the
+Scottish Turner.&rdquo;&nbsp; Somewhere, I believe, exists
+&ldquo;the Belgian Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Following this practice, Davies had to call Will either
+&ldquo;our English Terence,&rdquo; or &ldquo;our <a
+name="pagexxv"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xxv</span>English
+Plautus.&rdquo;&nbsp; Aristophanes would not have been generally
+recognised; and Will was no more like one of these ancient
+authors than another.&nbsp; Thus Davies was apt to choose either
+Plautus or Terence; it was even betting which he selected.&nbsp;
+But he chanced to choose Terence; and this is
+&ldquo;curious,&rdquo; and suggests suspicions to Mr.
+Greenwood&mdash;and the Baconians.&nbsp; They are so very full of
+suspicions!</p>
+<p>It does not suit the Baconians, or Mr. Greenwood, to find
+contemporary recognition of Will as an author. <a
+name="citation0i"></a><a href="#footnote0i"
+class="citation">[0i]</a>&nbsp; Consequently, Mr. Greenwood finds
+Davies&rsquo;s &ldquo;curious, and at first sight, inappropriate
+comparison of &lsquo;Shake-speare&rsquo; to Terence worthy of
+remark, for Terence is the very author whose name is alleged to
+have been used as a mask-name, or <i>nom de plume</i>, for the
+writings of great men who wished to keep the fact of their
+authorship concealed.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Now Davies felt bound to bring in <i>some</i> Roman parallel
+to Shakespeare; and had only the choice of Terence or
+Plautus.&nbsp; Meres (1598) used Plautus; Davies used
+Terence.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation0j"></a><a
+href="#footnote0j" class="citation">[0j]</a> shows us that
+Plautus would not do.&nbsp; &ldquo;Could <i>he</i>&rdquo;
+(Shakespeare) &ldquo;write only of courtesans and
+<i>cocottes</i>, and not of ladies highly born, cultured, and
+refined? . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The supposed parallel&rdquo; (Plautus and Shakespeare)
+&ldquo;breaks down at every point.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus, <a
+name="pagexxvi"></a><span class="pagenum">p. xxvi</span>on Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s showing, Plautus could not serve Davies, or
+should not serve him, in his search for a Roman parallel to
+&ldquo;good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood also writes,
+&ldquo;if he&rdquo; (Shakespeare) &ldquo;was to be likened to a
+Latin comedian, surely Plautus is the writer with whom he should
+have been compared.&rdquo; <a name="citation0k"></a><a
+href="#footnote0k" class="citation">[0k]</a>&nbsp; Yet Plautus
+was the very man who cannot be used as a parallel to
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; Of course no Roman nor any other comic
+dramatist closely resembles the <i>author</i> of <i>As You Like
+It</i>.&nbsp; They who selected either Plautus or Terence meant
+no more than that both were celebrated comic dramatists.&nbsp;
+Plautus was no parallel to Will.&nbsp; Yet &ldquo;surely Plautus
+is the author to whom he should have been compared&rdquo; by
+Davies, says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; If Davies tried Plautus, the
+comparison was bad; if Terence, it was &ldquo;curious,&rdquo; as
+Terence was absurdly accused of being the &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>&rdquo; of some great &ldquo;concealed poets&rdquo; of
+Rome.&nbsp; &ldquo;From all the known facts about Terence,&rdquo;
+says a Baconian critic (who has consulted Smith&rsquo;s
+<i>Biographical Dictionary</i>), &ldquo;it is an almost
+unavoidable inference that John Davies made the comparison to
+Shakspere because he knew of the point common to both
+cases.&rdquo;&nbsp; The common point is taken to be, not that
+both men were famous comic dramatists, but that Roman literary
+gossips said, and that Baconians and Mr. Greenwood say, that
+&ldquo;Terence&rdquo; was said to be a &ldquo;mask-name,&rdquo;
+and that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; <a name="pagexxvii"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. xxvii</span>is a mask-name.&nbsp; Of the
+second opinion there is not a hint in literature of the time of
+good Will.</p>
+<p>What surprises one most in this controversy is that men
+eminent in the legal profession should be
+&ldquo;anti-Shakesperean,&rdquo; if not overtly Baconian.&nbsp;
+For the evidence for the contemporary faith in Will&rsquo;s
+authorship is all positive; from his own age comes not a whisper
+of doubt, not even a murmur of surprise.&nbsp; It is incredible
+to me that his fellow-actors and fellow-playwrights should have
+been deceived, especially when they were such men as Ben Jonson
+and Tom Heywood.&nbsp; One would expect lawyers, of all people,
+to have been most impatient of the surprising attempts made to
+explain away Ben Jonson&rsquo;s testimony, by aid, first, of
+quite a false analogy (Scott&rsquo;s denial of his own authorship
+of his novels), and, secondly, by the suppression of such a
+familiar fact as the constant inconsistency of Ben&rsquo;s
+judgments of his contemporaries in literature.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood must have forgotten the many examples of this
+inconsistency; but I have met a Baconian author who knew nothing
+of the fact.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, it is proper to say, does not
+seem to be satisfied that he has solved what he calls &ldquo;the
+Jonsonian riddle.&rdquo;&nbsp; Really, there is no riddle.&nbsp;
+About Will, as about other authors, his contemporaries and even
+his friends, on occasion, Ben &ldquo;spoke with two
+voices,&rdquo; now in terms of hyperbolical praise, now in
+carping tones of <a name="pagexxviii"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. xxviii</span>censure.&nbsp; That is the
+obvious solution of &ldquo;the Jonsonian riddle.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I must apologise if I have in places spelled the name of the
+Swan of Avon &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; where Mr. Greenwood would
+write &ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo; and <i>vice versa</i>.&nbsp; He
+uses &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; where he means the Author;
+&ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo; where he means Will; and is vexed with
+some people who write the name of Will as
+&ldquo;Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; As Will, in the opinion of a
+considerable portion of the human race, and of myself, <i>was</i>
+the Author, one is apt to write his name as
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; in the usual way.&nbsp; But difficult
+cases occur, as in quotations, and in conditional
+sentences.&nbsp; By any spelling of the name I always mean the
+undivided personality of &ldquo;Him who sleeps by
+Avon.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>I<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN
+POSITIONS</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Till</span> the years 1856&ndash;7 no
+voice was raised against the current belief about Shakespeare
+(1564&ndash;1616).&nbsp; He was the author in the main of the
+plays usually printed as his.&nbsp; In some cases other authors,
+one or more, may have had fingers in his dramas; in other cases,
+Shakespeare may have &ldquo;written over&rdquo; and transfigured
+earlier plays, of himself and of others; he may have contributed,
+more or less, to several plays mainly by other men.&nbsp;
+Separately printed dramas published during his time carry his
+name on their title-pages, but are not included in the first
+collected edition of his dramas, &ldquo;The First Folio,&rdquo;
+put forth by two of his friends and fellow-actors, in 1623, seven
+years after his death.</p>
+<p>On all these matters did commentators, critics, and
+antiquarians for long dispute; but none denied that the actor,
+Will Shakspere (spelled as heaven pleased), was in the main the
+author of most of the plays of 1623, and the sole author of
+<i>Venus and Adonis</i>, <i>Lucrece</i>, and the Sonnets.</p>
+<p>Even now, in England at least, it would be perhaps impossible
+to find one special and professed student of Elizabethan
+literature, and of <a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+4</span>the classical and European literatures, who does not hold
+by the ancient belief, the belief of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+contemporaries and intimates, the belief that he was, in the
+sense explained above, the author of the plays.</p>
+<p>But ours is not a generation to be overawed by
+&ldquo;Authority&rdquo; (as it is called).&nbsp; A small but
+eager company of scholars have convinced themselves that Francis
+Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; That is the point of
+agreement among these enthusiasts: points of difference are
+numerous: some very wild little sects exist.&nbsp; Meanwhile
+multitudes of earnest and intelligent men and women, having read
+notices in newspapers of the Baconian books, or heard of them at
+lectures and tea-parties, disbelieve in the authorship of
+&ldquo;the Stratford rustic,&rdquo; and look down on the faithful
+of Will Shakespere with extreme contempt.</p>
+<p>From the Baconians we receive a plain straightforward theory,
+&ldquo;Bacon wrote Shakespeare,&rdquo; as one of their own
+prophets has said. <a name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a"
+class="citation">[4a]</a>&nbsp; Since we have plenty of evidence
+for Bacon&rsquo;s life and occupations during the period of
+Shakespearean poetic activity, we can compare what he was doing
+as a man, a student, a Crown lawyer, a pleader in the Courts, a
+political pamphleteer, essayist, courtier, active member of
+Parliament, and so on, with what he is said to have been <a
+name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 5</span>doing&mdash;by
+the Baconians; namely, writing two dramas yearly.</p>
+<p>But there is another &ldquo;Anti-Willian&rdquo; theory, which
+would dethrone Will Shakspere, and put but a Shadow in his
+place.&nbsp; Conceive a &ldquo;concealed poet,&rdquo; of high
+social position, contemporary with Bacon and Shakespeare.&nbsp;
+Let him be so fond of the Law that he cannot keep legal
+&ldquo;shop&rdquo; out of his love Sonnets even.&nbsp; Make him a
+courtier; a statesman; a philosopher; a scholar who does not
+blench even from the difficult Latin of Ovid and Plautus.&nbsp;
+Let this almost omniscient being possess supreme poetic genius,
+extensive classical attainments, and a tendency to make false
+quantities.&nbsp; Then conceive him to live through the reigns of
+&ldquo;Eliza and our James,&rdquo; without leaving in history, in
+science, in society, in law, in politics or scholarship, a single
+trace of his existence.&nbsp; He left nothing but the poems and
+plays usually attributed to Will.&nbsp; As to the date of his
+decease, we only know that it must necessarily have been later
+than the composition of the last genuine Shakespearean
+play&mdash;for this paragon wrote it.</p>
+<p>Such is the Being who occupies, in the theory of the
+non-Baconian, <i>but not Anti-Baconian</i>, Anti-Willians, the
+intellectual throne filled, in the Will Shakespeare theory, by
+Will; and in the Baconian, by Bacon&mdash;two kings of Brentford
+on one throne.</p>
+<p>We are to be much engaged by the form of <a
+name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 6</span>this theory
+which is held by Mr. G. G. Greenwood in his <i>The Shakespeare
+Problem Restated</i>.&nbsp; In attempting to explain what he
+means I feel that I am skating on very thin ice.&nbsp; Already,
+in two volumes (<i>In Re Shakespeare</i>, 1909, and <i>The
+Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>), Mr. Greenwood has accused his
+critics of frequently misconceiving and misrepresenting his
+ideas: wherefore I also tremble.&nbsp; I am perfectly confident
+in saying that he &ldquo;holds no brief for the
+Baconians.&rdquo;&nbsp; He is <i>not</i> a Baconian.&nbsp; His
+position is negative merely: Will of Stratford is <i>not</i> the
+author of the Shakespearean plays and poems.&nbsp; Then who
+is?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood believes that work by an unknown number
+of hands exists in the plays first published all together in
+1623.&nbsp; Here few will differ from him.&nbsp; But, setting
+aside this aspect of the case, Mr. Greenwood appears to me to
+believe in an entity named &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;the Author,&rdquo; who is the predominating partner;
+though Mr. Greenwood does not credit him with all the plays in
+the Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the absolute entirety of
+any given play).&nbsp; &ldquo;The Author&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; is not a syndicate (like the Homer of
+many critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the
+male sex.&nbsp; As to the name by which he was called on earth,
+Mr. Greenwood is &ldquo;agnostic.&rdquo;&nbsp; He himself is not
+Anti-Baconian.&nbsp; He does not oust Bacon and put the Unknown
+in his place.&nbsp; He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may
+<a name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>have
+contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean
+work.&nbsp; To put it briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field
+against the favourite (our Will), and Bacon <i>may</i> be in the
+field.&nbsp; If he has any part in the whole I suspect that it is
+&ldquo;the lion&rsquo;s part,&rdquo; but Mr. Greenwood does not
+commit himself to anything positive.&nbsp; We shall find (if I am
+not mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the hypothesis of the
+Baconians as &ldquo;an extremely reasonable one,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation7a"></a><a href="#footnote7a"
+class="citation">[7a]</a> and that for his purposes it would be
+an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential.&nbsp; For as
+Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit,
+he is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily
+believe&mdash;I cannot believe&mdash;that the actual
+&ldquo;Author,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; lived and
+died and left no trace of his existence except his share in the
+works called Shakespearean.</p>
+<p>However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans,
+this advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly
+unknown, we cannot, as in Bacon&rsquo;s case, show how he was
+occupied while the plays were being composed.&nbsp; He
+<i>must</i>, however, have been much at Court, we learn, and deep
+in the mysteries of legal terminology.&nbsp; Was he Sir Edward
+Coke?&nbsp; Was he James VI and I?</p>
+<p>It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians
+and of the &ldquo;Anti-Willians&rdquo; in a shape which will
+satisfy them.&nbsp; The task, especially <a
+name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 8</span>when undertaken
+by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible.&nbsp; I can
+only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to
+understand them.&nbsp; I conceive the Baconians to cry that
+&ldquo;the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature,
+attributed to a man named William
+<i>Shakespeare</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of a man named William
+<i>Shakspere</i> (there are many varieties of spelling) we
+certainly know that he was born (1564) and bred in
+Stratford-on-Avon, a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant
+country town.&nbsp; There is absolutely no evidence that he (or
+any Stratford boy of his standing) ever went to Stratford
+school.&nbsp; His father, his mother, and his daughter could not
+write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if he could write,
+which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.&nbsp; As far
+as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death
+inform us, he was a butcher&rsquo;s apprentice; and also a
+schoolmaster &ldquo;who knew Latin pretty well&rdquo;; and a
+poacher.&nbsp; He made, before he was nineteen, a marriage
+tainted with what Meg Dods calls &ldquo;ante-nup.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his
+wife.&nbsp; He came to London, we do not know when (about 1582,
+according to the &ldquo;guess&rdquo; of an antiquary of 1680);
+held horses at the door of a theatre (so tradition says), was
+promoted to the rank of &ldquo;servitor&rdquo; (whatever that may
+mean), became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594
+played before Queen Elizabeth.&nbsp; <a name="page9"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 9</span>He put money in his pocket (heaven
+knows how), for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in
+his native <i>bourgade</i>.&nbsp; He obtained, by nefarious
+genealogical falsehoods (too common, alas, in heraldry), the
+right to bear arms; and went on acting.&nbsp; In 1610&ndash;11
+(?) he retired to his native place.&nbsp; He never took any
+interest in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he
+never troubled himself about his valuable copyrights; never
+dreamed of making a collected edition of his works.&nbsp; He died
+in 1616, probably of drink taken.&nbsp; Legal documents prove him
+to have been a lender of small sums, an avid creditor, a would-be
+encloser of commons.&nbsp; In his will he does not bequeath or
+mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.&nbsp;
+It is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and
+plays, so rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge,
+which are attributed to &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+These must be the works of &ldquo;a concealed poet,&rdquo; a
+philosopher, a courtier moving in the highest circles, a supreme
+legist, and, necessarily, a great poet, and student of the
+classics.</p>
+<p>No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a
+legist, a scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all
+the other qualifications so the author of the plays either was
+Francis Bacon&mdash;or some person unknown, who was in all
+respects equally distinguished, but kept his light under a
+bushel.&nbsp; Consequently the name &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; is a pseudonym or &ldquo;pen-name&rdquo; <a
+name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>wisely
+adopted by Bacon (or the other man) as early as 1593, at a time
+when William Shakspere was notoriously an actor in the company
+which produced the plays of the genius styling himself
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding
+and of expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody,
+I have now summarised the views of the Baconians <i>sans
+phrase</i>, and of the more cautious or more credulous
+&ldquo;Anti-Willians,&rdquo; as I may style the party who deny to
+Will the actor any share in the authorship of the plays, but do
+not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.</p>
+<p>Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side
+of the controversy is <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, by
+Mr. G. G. Greenwood (see my Introduction).&nbsp; To this volume I
+turn for the exposition of the theory that &ldquo;Will
+Shakspere&rdquo; (with many other spellings) is an actor from the
+country&mdash;a man of very scanty education, in all probability,
+and wholly destitute of books; while &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare,&rdquo; or with the hyphen,
+&ldquo;Shake-speare,&rdquo; is a &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>&rdquo; adopted by the Great Unknown &ldquo;concealed
+poet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When I use the word &ldquo;author&rdquo; here, I understand
+Mr. Greenwood to mean that in the plays called
+&ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; there exists work from many pens:
+owing to the curious literary manners, methods, and ethics of
+dramatic writing in, say, 1589&ndash;1611.&nbsp; In my own poor
+opinion this is <a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+11</span>certainly true of several plays in the first collected
+edition, &ldquo;The Folio,&rdquo; produced seven years after
+Will&rsquo;s death, namely in 1623.&nbsp; These curious
+&ldquo;collective&rdquo; methods of play-writing are to be
+considered later.</p>
+<p>Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory
+that &ldquo;William Shake-speare&rdquo; (with or without the
+hyphen), on the title-pages of plays, or when signed to the
+dedications of poems, is the chosen pen-name, or &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>,&rdquo; of Bacon or of the Unknown.</p>
+<p>Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has
+written <a name="citation11a"></a><a href="#footnote11a"
+class="citation">[11a]</a> on the name of the actor, and the
+&ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of the unknown author who, by
+the theory, was not the actor.&nbsp; Let me first confess my firm
+belief that there is no cause for all the copious writing about
+the spellings &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Shake-speare&rdquo;&mdash;as indicating the true but
+&ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo;&mdash;and &ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo;
+(&amp;c.), as indicating the Warwickshire rustic.&nbsp; At
+Stratford and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in scores
+of ways, was spelled in different ways within a single
+document.&nbsp; If the actor himself uniformly wrote
+&ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo; (it seems that we have but five
+signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled
+variously in documents concerning him and his affairs.&nbsp; In
+London the printers aimed at a kind of uniformity,
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; or &ldquo;Shake-speare&rdquo;: and even
+if he wrote his <a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+12</span>own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.&nbsp;
+Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of
+spelling&mdash;and there is no more in the matter.</p>
+<p>I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where
+quotations are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s researches.&nbsp; &ldquo;The family of William
+Shakspere of Stratford&rdquo; (perhaps it were safer to say
+&ldquo;the members of his name&rdquo;) &ldquo;wrote their name in
+many different ways&mdash;some sixty, I believe, have been noted
+. . . but the form &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; seems never to have
+been employed by them&rdquo;; and, according to Mr. Spedding,
+&ldquo;Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name &lsquo;in
+any known case.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; (According to many Baconians
+he never wrote his name in his life.)&nbsp; On the other hand,
+the dedications of <i>Venus and Adonis</i> (1593) and of
+<i>Lucrece</i> (1594) are inscribed &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; (without the hyphen).&nbsp; In 1598, the
+title-page of <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> &ldquo;bore
+the name W. Shakespere,&rdquo; while in the same year <i>Richard
+II</i> and <i>Richard III</i> bear &ldquo;William
+Shake-speare,&rdquo; with the hyphen (not without it, as in the
+two dedications by the Author).&nbsp; &ldquo;The name which
+appears in the body of the conveyance and of the mortgage
+bearing&rdquo; (the actor&rsquo;s) &ldquo;signature is
+&lsquo;Shakespeare,&rsquo; while &lsquo;Shackspeare&rsquo;
+appears in the will, prepared, as we must presume, by or under
+the directions of Francis Collyns, the Stratford solicitor, who
+was one of the witnesses thereto&rdquo; (and received a legacy of
+&pound;13, 6<i>s.</i> 8<i>d.</i>).</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p12b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Copy of the title-page of &ldquo;Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost,&rdquo; 1598.  The earliest title-page in which
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s name is given as the author of the work.
+From J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps&rsquo; Outlines of the Life of
+Shakespeare"
+title=
+"Copy of the title-page of &ldquo;Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost,&rdquo; 1598.  The earliest title-page in which
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s name is given as the author of the work.
+From J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps&rsquo; Outlines of the Life of
+Shakespeare"
+ src="images/p12s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 13</span>Thus,
+at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it
+is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the
+title-pages&mdash;and also is spelled otherwise, as
+&ldquo;Shackspeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; In March 1594 the actor&rsquo;s
+name is spelled &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; in Treasury
+accounts.&nbsp; The legal and the literary and Treasury spellings
+(and conveyances and mortgages and wills are <i>not</i>
+literature) are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare,
+Shakespere&mdash;all four are used, but we must regard the actor
+as never signing &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; in any of these
+varieties of spelling&mdash;if sign he ever did; at all events he
+is not known to have used the <i>a</i> in the last syllable.</p>
+<p>I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s words <a
+name="citation13a"></a><a href="#footnote13a"
+class="citation">[13a]</a> concerning the <i>nom de plume</i> of
+the &ldquo;concealed poet,&rdquo; whoever he was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And now a word upon the name
+&lsquo;Shakespeare.&rsquo;&nbsp; That in this form, and more
+especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare, the word makes an
+excellent <i>nom de plume</i> is obvious.&nbsp; As old Thomas
+Fuller remarks, the name suggests <i>Martial</i> in its warlike
+sound, &lsquo;Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is
+of course further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the goddess of
+Wisdom, for Pallas also was a spear-shaker (Pallas
+&#8048;&pi;&#8056; &tau;&omicron;&upsilon;
+&pi;&#940;&lambda;&lambda;&epsilon;&iota;&nu; &tau;&#8056;
+&delta;&#972;&rho;&upsilon;); and all will remember Ben
+Jonson&rsquo;s verses . . . &rdquo; on Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;true-filed lines&rdquo;&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In each of which he seems to shake a
+lance,<br />
+As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 14</span>There
+is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can
+easily be made), and about &ldquo;Jonson&rsquo;s Cri-spinus or
+Cri-spinas,&rdquo; but perhaps we have now the gist of Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s remarks on the &ldquo;excellent <i>nom de
+plume</i>&rdquo; (<i>cf.</i> pp. 31&ndash;37.&nbsp; On the whole
+of this, <i>cf. The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, pp.
+293&ndash;295; a <i>nom de plume</i> called a
+&ldquo;pseudonym,&rdquo; pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare &ldquo;a mask
+name,&rdquo; p. 328; a &ldquo;pseudonym,&rdquo; p. 330;
+&ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo; p. 335).</p>
+<p>Now why was the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;pseudonym&rdquo; &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo;
+&ldquo;an excellent <i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; for a concealed
+author, courtier, lawyer, scholar, and so forth?&nbsp; If
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; suggested Pallas Athene, goddess of
+wisdom and of many other things, and so was appropriate, why add
+&ldquo;William&rdquo;?</p>
+<p>In 1593, when the &ldquo;pseudonym&rdquo; first appears in
+<i>Venus and Adonis</i>, a country actor whose name, in legal
+documents&mdash;presumably drawn up by or for his friend, Francis
+Collyns at Stratford&mdash;is written &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare,&rdquo; was before the town as an actor in the
+leading company, that of the Lord Chamberlain.&nbsp; This company
+produced the plays some of which, by 1598, bear &ldquo;W.
+Shakespere,&rdquo; or &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; on their
+title-pages.&nbsp; Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his
+name &ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo; &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo;
+was, practically (on the Baconian theory), not only a pseudonym
+of one man, a poet, but also the real name of another man, a
+well-known actor, who was <i>not</i> the &ldquo;concealed
+poet.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+15</span>&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Shakespere&rdquo; was thus, in my view, the ideally worst
+pseudonym which a poet who wished to be &ldquo;concealed&rdquo;
+could possibly have had the fatuity to select.&nbsp; His plays
+and poems would be, as they were, universally attributed to the
+actor, who is represented as a person conspicuously incapable of
+writing them.&nbsp; With Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s arguments against
+the certainty of this attribution I deal later.</p>
+<p>Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education
+and wide reading, the choice of name might have been
+judicious.&nbsp; A &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; of high social
+standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting the plays of
+contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies from
+their owners, the Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s Company, through that
+knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will
+Shakspere.&nbsp; He might then rewrite and improve them, more or
+less, as it was his whim to do.&nbsp; The actor might make fair
+copies in his own hand, give them to his company, and say that
+the improved works were from his own pen and genius.&nbsp; The
+lie might pass, but only if the actor, in his life and witty
+talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended to have
+done.&nbsp; But if the actor, according to some Baconians, could
+not write even his own name, he was impossible as a mask for the
+poet.&nbsp; He was also impossible, I think, if he were what Mr.
+Greenwood describes him to be.</p>
+<p><a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 16</span>Mr.
+Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to
+London, does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his
+name.&nbsp; But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of
+which there is no documentary record), according to Mr.
+Halliwell-Phillipps &ldquo;he was removed from school long before
+the usual age,&rdquo; &ldquo;in all probability&rdquo; when
+&ldquo;he was about thirteen&rdquo; (an age at which some boys,
+later well known, went up to their universities).&nbsp; If we
+send him to school at seven or so, &ldquo;it appears that he
+could only have enjoyed such advantages as it may be supposed to
+have provided for a period of five or six years at the
+outside.&nbsp; He was then withdrawn, and, as it seems, put to
+calf-slaughtering.&rdquo; <a name="citation16a"></a><a
+href="#footnote16a" class="citation">[16a]</a></p>
+<p>What the advantages may have been we try to estimate
+later.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will
+&ldquo;could have learned but little there.&nbsp; No doubt boys
+at Elizabethan grammar schools, if they remained long enough, had
+a good deal of Latin driven into them.&nbsp; Latin, indeed, was
+the one subject that was taught; and an industrious boy who had
+gone through the course and attained to the higher classes would
+generally be able to write fair Latin prose.&nbsp; But he would
+learn very little else&rdquo; (except to write fair Latin
+prose?).&nbsp; &ldquo;What we now call &lsquo;culture&rsquo;
+certainly did not enter into the &lsquo;curriculum,&rsquo; nor
+&lsquo;English,&rsquo; nor modern languages, nor
+&lsquo;literature.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation17a"></a><a
+href="#footnote17a" class="citation">[17a]</a>&nbsp; <a
+name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>Mr.
+Halliwell-Phillipps says that &ldquo;removed prematurely from
+school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless
+neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to
+scholastic progress&mdash;it is difficult to believe that when he
+first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished
+accomplishments.&rdquo; <a name="citation17b"></a><a
+href="#footnote17b" class="citation">[17b]</a>&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a butcher or draper, but
+doubts the poaching, and the frequent whippings and
+imprisonments, as in the story told by the Rev. R. Davies in
+1708. <a name="citation17c"></a><a href="#footnote17c"
+class="citation">[17c]</a></p>
+<p>That this promising young man, &ldquo;when he came to London,
+spoke the Warwickshire dialect or <i>patois</i> is, then, as
+certain as anything can be that is incapable of mathematical
+proof.&rdquo; <a name="citation17d"></a><a href="#footnote17d"
+class="citation">[17d]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;Here is the young
+Warwickshire provincial . . . &rdquo; <a
+name="citation17e"></a><a href="#footnote17e"
+class="citation">[17e]</a> producing, apparently five or six
+years after his arrival in town, <i>Venus and Adonis</i> . . .
+&ldquo;Is it conceivable that this was the work of the Stratford
+Player of whom we know so little, but of whom we know so much too
+much?&nbsp; If so we have here a veritable sixteenth-century
+miracle.&rdquo; <a name="citation17f"></a><a href="#footnote17f"
+class="citation">[17f]</a>&nbsp; Moreover, &ldquo;our great
+supposed poet and dramatist had at his death neither book nor
+manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally
+entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation17g"></a><a href="#footnote17g"
+class="citation">[17g]</a></p>
+<p>If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a
+<i>patois</i> could write <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, <a
+name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 18</span>manifestly it
+was inconceivable in 1593, when <i>Venus and Adonis</i> was
+signed &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; No man who knew
+the actor (as described) could believe that he was the author,
+but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the
+faintest doubt was thrown on the actor&rsquo;s authorship;
+ignorant as he was, bookless, and rude of speech.&nbsp; For such
+a Will as Mr. Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and
+dramatic world of his age that he <i>did</i> write the plays,
+would have been a miracle.&nbsp; Consequently Mr. Greenwood has
+to try to persuade us that there is no sufficient evidence that
+Will <i>did</i> persuade, say Ben Jonson, of his authorship and
+we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-century
+miracle of persuasion.</p>
+<p>Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an
+enthusiastic Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could
+not easily pass for the Author. <a name="citation18a"></a><a
+href="#footnote18a" class="citation">[18a]</a>&nbsp; But his own
+bookless actor with a <i>patois</i> seems to him, as author of
+<i>Venus and Adonis</i>, almost inconceivable.&nbsp; Yet, despite
+Will&rsquo;s bookless rusticity, this poem with <i>Lucrece</i>,
+which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into
+English by 1593, was regarded as his own.&nbsp; I must suppose,
+therefore, that Will was <i>not</i> manifestly so ignorant of
+Latin as Mr. Greenwood thinks.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think it highly
+probable,&rdquo; says this critic, &ldquo;that he attended the
+Grammar School at Stratford&rdquo; (where nothing but Latin <a
+name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 19</span>was taught)
+&ldquo;for four or five years, and that, later in life, after
+some years in London, he was probably able to &lsquo;bumbast out
+a line,&rsquo; and perhaps to pose as &lsquo;Poet-Ape that would
+be thought our chief.&rsquo;&nbsp; Nay, I am not at all sure that
+he would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man
+as George Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if
+not even better.&nbsp; But it does not follow from this that he
+was the author either of <i>Venus and Adonis</i> or of
+<i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo; <a name="citation19a"></a><a
+href="#footnote19a" class="citation">[19a]</a></p>
+<p>Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s private opinion, the actor might write even
+better than George Wilkins, but could not write <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i>.&nbsp; Will, therefore, though bookless, is not
+debarred here from the pursuits of literature, in partnership
+with Wilkins.&nbsp; We have merely the critic&rsquo;s opinion
+that Will could not write <i>Hamlet</i>, even if, like
+Wordsworth, &ldquo;he had the mind,&rdquo; even if the gods had
+made him more poetical than Wilkins.</p>
+<p>Again, &ldquo;he had had but little schooling; he had
+&lsquo;small Latin and less Greek&rsquo;&rdquo; (as Ben Jonson
+truly says), &ldquo;but he was a good <i>Johannes Factotum</i>;
+he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, &lsquo;bumbast out
+a blank verse.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation19b"></a><a
+href="#footnote19b" class="citation">[19b]</a></p>
+<p>The &ldquo;<i>Johannes Factotum</i>,&rdquo; who could
+&ldquo;bumbast out a blank verse,&rdquo; is taken from Robert <a
+name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+20</span>Greene&rsquo;s hackneyed attack on an actor-poet,
+&ldquo;Shake-scene,&rdquo; published in 1592.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief,&rdquo; is from
+an epigram on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601&ndash;16?).&nbsp;
+If the allusions by Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by
+1592, had a literary ambition so towering that he thought his own
+work in the new art of dramatic blank verse was equal to that of
+Marlowe (not to speak of Wilkins), and Greene reckoned him a
+dangerous rival to three of his playwright friends, of whom
+Marlowe is one, apparently.</p>
+<p>If Jonson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; be meant for Will, by
+1601 Will would fain &ldquo;be thought the chief&rdquo; of
+contemporary dramatists.&nbsp; His vanity soared far above George
+Wilkins!&nbsp; Greene&rsquo;s phrases and Jonson&rsquo;s are
+dictated by spite, jealousy, and envy; and from them a true view
+of the work of the man whom they envy, the actor-poet, cannot be
+obtained.&nbsp; We might as well judge Moli&egrave;re in the
+spirit of the author of <i>Elomire Hypocondre</i>, and of de
+Vis&eacute;!&nbsp; The Anti-Willian arguments keep on appearing,
+going behind the scenes, and reappearing, like a stage
+army.&nbsp; To avoid this phenomenon I reserve what is to be said
+about &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; and &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; for
+another place (pp. 138&ndash;145 <i>infra</i>).&nbsp; But I must
+give the reader a warning.&nbsp; Concerning &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; as a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo; or
+pseudonym, Mr. Greenwood says, &ldquo;Some, indeed, would see
+through it, and roundly accuse the <a name="page21"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 21</span>player of putting forth the works of
+others as his own.&nbsp; To such he would be a
+&lsquo;Poet-Ape,&rsquo; or &lsquo;an upstart crow&rsquo;
+(Shake-scene) &lsquo;beautified with the feathers of other
+writers.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation21a"></a><a
+href="#footnote21a" class="citation">[21a]</a></p>
+<p>If this be true, if &ldquo;some would see through&rdquo; (Mr.
+Greenwood, apparently, means <i>did</i> &ldquo;see
+through&rdquo;) the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo; the case
+of the Anti-Willians is promising.&nbsp; But, in this matter, Mr.
+Greenwood <i>se trompe</i>.&nbsp; Neither Greene nor Jonson
+accused &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; or &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; of
+&ldquo;putting forth the works of others as his own.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That is quite certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene
+have reached us.&nbsp; (See pp. 141&ndash;145 <i>infra</i>.)</p>
+<p>If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were
+credited with the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in
+&ldquo;the profession,&rdquo; and among rival playwrights who
+envied the wealth and &ldquo;glory&rdquo; of the actors.&nbsp;
+This curiosity, prompting the wits and players to watch and
+&ldquo;shadow&rdquo; Will, would, to put it mildly, most
+seriously imperil the secret of the concealed author who had the
+folly to sign himself &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Human nature could not rest under such a provocation as the
+&ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; offered.</p>
+<p>This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the
+Unknown to be the concealed author, one must have credited his
+mask, Will, with abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for <a
+name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+22</span>learning&mdash;with about as much as he probably
+possessed.&nbsp; But the Baconians make him an illiterate yokel,
+and we have quoted Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s estimate of the young
+Warwickshire provincial.</p>
+<p>We all have our personal equations in the way of belief.&nbsp;
+That the plot of the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; should
+have evaded discovery for a week, if the actor were the untutored
+countryman of the hypotheses, is to me, for one, absolutely
+incredible.&nbsp; A &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; looking about
+for a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; and a mask behind which
+he could be hidden, would not have selected the name, or the
+nearest possible approach to the name, of an ignorant unread
+actor.&nbsp; As he was never suspected of not being the author of
+the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus,
+manifestly incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the
+plays exhibit.&nbsp; Every one must judge for himself.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood fervently believes in what I disbelieve. <a
+name="citation22a"></a><a href="#footnote22a"
+class="citation">[22a]</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan <a
+name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 23</span>times,
+concerned themselves at all, or cared one brass farthing, about
+the authorship of plays . . . &rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood.</p>
+<p>Very few care now.&nbsp; They know the actors&rsquo; names: in
+vain, as a rule, do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of
+their entertainment.&nbsp; But in Elizabeth&rsquo;s time the few
+who cared were apt to care very much, and they would inquire
+intensely when the Stratford actor, a bookless, untaught man, was
+announced as the author of plays which were among the most
+popular of their day.&nbsp; The seekers never found any other
+author.&nbsp; They left no hint that they suspected the existence
+of any other author.&nbsp; Hence I venture to infer that Will
+seemed to them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite
+fancy,&mdash;no scholar to be sure, but very capable of writing
+the pieces which he fathered.</p>
+<p>They may all have been mistaken.&nbsp; Nobody can prove that
+Heywood and Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not
+mistaken.&nbsp; But certain it is that they thought the Will whom
+<a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 24</span>they knew
+capable of the works which were attributed to him.&nbsp;
+Therefore he cannot possibly have been the man who could not
+write, of the more impulsive Baconians; or the bookless, and
+probably all but Latinless, man of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+theory.&nbsp; The positions already seem to me to be
+untenable.</p>
+<h2><a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>II<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">THE &ldquo;SILENCE&rdquo; ABOUT
+SHAKESPEARE</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> proceeding further to
+examine Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s book, and the Baconian theories,
+with the careful attention which they deserve, we must clear the
+ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle Baconians,
+though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the
+problems.</p>
+<p>The first question is: Why, considering that Shakespeare, by
+the consent of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations,
+was one of the world&rsquo;s very greatest poets, have we
+received so few and such brief notices of him from the pens of
+his contemporaries?</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is wonderful,&rdquo; exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor,
+&ldquo;that hundreds of persons should not have left records of
+him. <a name="citation27a"></a><a href="#footnote27a"
+class="citation">[27a]</a>&nbsp; We know nearly as much about the
+most insignificant writer of the period as we know of him, but
+fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.&nbsp; It is
+senseless to try to account for this otherwise than by
+recognising that the man was not the author.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent.&nbsp; He sees the
+sixteenth century in the colours of the <a
+name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+28</span>twentieth.&nbsp; We know nothing, except a few dates of
+birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court, and
+so forth, concerning several of Shakespeare&rsquo;s illustrious
+contemporaries and successors in the art of dramatic
+poetry.&nbsp; The Baconians do not quite understand, or, at
+least, keep steadily before their minds, one immense difference
+between the Elizabethan age and later times.&nbsp; In
+1590&ndash;1630, there was no public excitement about the
+characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men,
+poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs,
+as Spenser did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who
+did not write about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene
+and Nash; who did not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and
+satires, like Ben Jonson; who never killed anybody, as Ben did;
+nor were killed, like Marlowe; nor were involved, like him, in
+charges of atheism, and so forth; nor imprisoned with every
+chance of having their ears and noses slit, like Marston.&nbsp;
+Consequently, silence and night obscure the lives and
+personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker,
+Webster, and several others, as night and silence hide
+Shakespeare from our view.</p>
+<p>He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated
+separately in cheap and very perishable quartos.&nbsp; No
+collected edition of his plays appeared during his life; without
+that he could not be studied, and recognised in his <a
+name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+29</span>greatness.&nbsp; He withdrew to the country and
+died.&nbsp; There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him; nobody
+Boswellised any playwright of his time.&nbsp; The Folio of 1623
+gave the first opportunity of studying him as alone he can be
+studied.&nbsp; The Civil Wars and the Reign of the Saints
+distracted men&rsquo;s minds and depressed or destroyed the
+Stage.</p>
+<p>Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see
+the actor at his father&rsquo;s inn at Oxford, was interested in
+him, and cherished the embers of the drama, which were fading
+before the theatres were closed.&nbsp; Davenant collected what he
+could in the way of information from old people of the stage; he
+told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation; a few reached the
+late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680&ndash;90 at
+earliest.&nbsp; The memories of ancient people of the theatre and
+clerks and sextons at Stratford were ransacked, to very little
+purpose.</p>
+<p>As these things were so, how can we expect biographical
+materials about Shakespeare?&nbsp; As to the man, as to how his
+character impressed contemporaries, we have but the current
+epithets: &ldquo;friendly,&rdquo; &ldquo;gentle,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; the praise of his worth by two of the actors
+in his company (published in 1623), and the brief prose note of
+Ben Jonson,&mdash;this is more than we have for the then so
+widely admired Beaumont, Ben Jonson&rsquo;s friend, or Chapman,
+or the adored Fletcher.&nbsp; &ldquo;Into the dark go one and
+all,&rdquo; Shakespeare and the others.&nbsp; <a
+name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>To be puzzled
+by and found theories on the silence about Shakespeare is to show
+an innocence very odd in learned disputants.</p>
+<p>The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of
+their own misappreciation of the literary and social conditions
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s time.&nbsp; That world could not possibly
+appreciate his works as we do; the world, till 1623, possessed
+only a portion of his plays in cheap pamphlets, in several of
+these his text was mangled and in places unintelligible.&nbsp;
+And in not a single instance were anecdotes and biographical
+traits of playwrights recorded, except when the men published
+matter about themselves, or when they became notorious in some
+way unconnected with their literary works.&nbsp; Drummond, in
+Scotland, made brief notes of Ben Jonson&rsquo;s talk;
+Shakespeare he never met.</p>
+<p>That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of
+literary merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in
+no other way notorious or eminent.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood justly
+says &ldquo;the contemporary eulogies of the poet afford proof
+that there were some cultured critics of that day of sufficient
+taste and acumen to recognise, or partly recognise, his
+excellence . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation30a"></a><a
+href="#footnote30a" class="citation">[30a]</a>&nbsp; (Here I omit
+some words, presently to be restored to the text.)&nbsp; From
+such critics the poet received such applause as has reached us.
+We also know that the plays were popular; <a
+name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 31</span>but the
+audiences have not rushed to pen and ink to record their
+satisfaction.&nbsp; With them, as with all audiences, the actors
+and the <i>spectacle</i>, much more than the
+&ldquo;cackle,&rdquo; were the attractions.&nbsp; When Dr.
+Ingleby says that &ldquo;the bard of our admiration was unknown
+to the men of that age,&rdquo; he uses hyperbole, and means, I
+presume, that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great
+majority; and that those who knew him in part made no modern fuss
+about him. <a name="citation31a"></a><a href="#footnote31a"
+class="citation">[31a]</a></p>
+<p>The second puzzle is,&mdash;Why did Shakespeare, conscious of
+his great powers, never secure for his collected plays the
+permanence of print and publication?&nbsp; We cannot be sure that
+he and his company, in fact, did not provide publishers with the
+copy for the better Quartos or pamphlets of separate plays, as
+Mr. Pollard argues on good grounds that they sometimes did. <a
+name="citation31b"></a><a href="#footnote31b"
+class="citation">[31b]</a>&nbsp; For the rest, no dramatic author
+edited a complete edition of his works before Ben Jonson, a
+scholarly man, set the example in the year of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s, and of Beaumont&rsquo;s death (1616).&nbsp;
+Neither Beaumont nor Fletcher collected and published their works
+for the Stage.&nbsp; The idea was unheard of before Jonson set
+the example, and much of his work lay unprinted till years <a
+name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>after his
+death. We must remember the conditions of play-writing in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s time.</p>
+<p>There were then many poets of no mean merit, all capable of
+admirable verse on occasion; and in various degrees possessed of
+the lofty, vigorous, and vivid style of that great age.&nbsp; The
+theatre, and writing for the theatre, afforded to many men of
+talent a means of livelihood analogous to that offered by
+journalism among ourselves.&nbsp; They were apt to work
+collectively, several hands hurrying out a single play; and in
+twos or threes, or fours or fives, they often collaborated.</p>
+<p>As a general rule a play when finished was sold by the author
+or authors to a company of players, or to a speculator like the
+notorious Philip Henslowe, and the new owners, &ldquo;the grand
+possessors,&rdquo; were usually averse to the publication of the
+work, lest other companies might act it.&nbsp; The plays were
+primarily written to be acted.&nbsp; The company in possession
+could have the play altered as they pleased by a literary man in
+their employment.</p>
+<p>To follow Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s summary of the situation
+&ldquo;it would seem that an author could restrain any person
+from publishing his manuscript, or could bring an action against
+him for so doing, so long as he had not disposed of his right to
+it; and that the publisher could prevent any other publisher from
+issuing the work.&nbsp; At the same time it is clear that the law
+was <a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+33</span>frequently violated . . . whether because of the
+difficulty of enforcing it, or through the supineness of authors;
+and that in consequence authors were frequently defrauded by
+surreptitious copies of their works being issued by piratical
+publishers.&rdquo; <a name="citation33a"></a><a
+href="#footnote33a" class="citation">[33a]</a></p>
+<p>It may appear that to &ldquo;authors&rdquo; we should, in the
+case of plays, add &ldquo;owners,&rdquo; such as theatrical
+companies, for no case is cited in which such a company brings an
+action against the publisher of a play which they own.&nbsp; The
+two players of Shakespeare&rsquo;s company who sign the preface
+to the first edition of his collected plays (1623, &ldquo;The
+First Folio&rdquo;) complain that &ldquo;divers stolen and
+surreptitious copies&rdquo; of single plays have been put forth,
+&ldquo;maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of
+injurious impostors.&rdquo;&nbsp; They speak as if they were
+unable to prevent, or had not the energy to prevent, these
+frauds.&nbsp; In the accounts of the aforesaid Henslowe, we find
+him paying forty shillings to a printer to stop or
+&ldquo;stay&rdquo; the printing of a play, <i>Patient Grizel</i>,
+by three of his hacks.</p>
+<p>We perhaps come across an effort of the company to prevent or
+delay the publication of <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, on July
+17, 1598, in the <i>Stationers&rsquo; Register</i>.&nbsp; James
+Robertes, and all other printers, are forbidden to print the book
+without previous permission from the Lord Chamberlain, the
+protector of Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s company.&nbsp; Two years
+passed before Robertes issued <a name="page34"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 34</span>the book. <a
+name="citation34a"></a><a href="#footnote34a"
+class="citation">[34a]</a>&nbsp; As is well known, Heywood, a
+most prolific playwright, boasts that he never made a double sale
+of his pieces to the players and the press.&nbsp; Others
+occasionally did, which Heywood clearly thought less than
+honest.</p>
+<p>As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his
+company, Will&rsquo;s interests were the same as theirs.&nbsp; It
+is therefore curious that some of his pieces were early printed,
+in quartos, from very good copies; while others appeared in very
+bad copies, clearly surreptitious.&nbsp; Probably the company
+gave a good MS. copy, sometimes, to a printer who offered
+satisfactory terms, after the gloss of novelty was off the acted
+play. <a name="citation34b"></a><a href="#footnote34b"
+class="citation">[34b]</a>&nbsp; In any case, we see that the
+custom and interests of the owners of manuscript plays ran
+contrary to their early publication.&nbsp; In 1619 even Ben
+Jonson, who loved publication, told Drummond that half of his
+comedies were still unprinted.</p>
+<p>These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by
+ours.&nbsp; Whoever wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the
+Man in the Moon; whoever legally owned the manuscripts, was
+equally incurious and negligent about the preservation of a
+correct text.&nbsp; As we shall see later, while Baconians urge
+without any evidence that Bacon himself edited, or gave to Ben
+Jonson <a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>the
+duty of editing, the first collected edition (1623), the work has
+been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless manner, and,
+as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly states, the edition, in his opinion,
+contains at least two plays not by his
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;&mdash;that &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo;&mdash;and masses of &ldquo;non-Shakespearean&rdquo;
+work.</p>
+<p>How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either
+revised the plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an
+Editor as Ben Jonson, I cannot imagine.&nbsp; This is also one of
+the difficulties in Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s theory.&nbsp; Thus we
+cannot argue, &ldquo;if the actor were the author, he must have
+been conscious of his great powers.&nbsp; Therefore the actor
+cannot have been the author, for the actor wholly neglected to
+collect his printed and to print his manuscript works.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the
+plays by Bacon.&nbsp; He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished
+till 1623.&nbsp; &ldquo;But he could not avow his
+authorship,&rdquo; cry Baconians, giving various exquisite
+reasons.&nbsp; Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he might not
+care to divulge his long association with &ldquo;a cry of
+players,&rdquo; and a man like Will of Stratford.&nbsp; But he
+had no occasion to avow it.&nbsp; He had merely to suggest to the
+players, through any safe channel, that they should collect and
+publish the works of their old friend Will Shakspere.</p>
+<p>Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he
+were actor or statesman; and <a name="page36"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 36</span>the actor, at least, is not to blame
+for the chaos of the first collected edition, made while he was
+in his grave, and while Bacon was busy in revising and
+superintending Latin translations of his works on scientific
+subjects.</p>
+<p>We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of
+Shakspere the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was
+extreme, whether or not he were the author.&nbsp; The neglect was
+characteristic of the playwrights of his own and the next
+generation.&nbsp; In those days it was no marvel; few
+cared.&nbsp; Nine years passed before a second edition of the
+collected plays appeared: thirty-two years went by before a third
+edition was issued&mdash;years of war and tumult, yet they saw
+the posthumous publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and
+Fletcher.</p>
+<p>There remains one more mystery connected with
+publication.&nbsp; When the first collected edition of the plays
+appeared, it purported to contain &ldquo;All His Comedies,
+Histories, and Tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp; According to the postulate
+of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by Jonson acting
+for him.&nbsp; It contains several plays which, according to many
+critics, are not the author&rsquo;s.&nbsp; This, if true, is
+mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays were published,
+as by Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor and of
+Bacon; plays which neither acknowledged for his own, for we hear
+of no remonstrance from&mdash;whoever &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; was.&nbsp; It is impossible <a
+name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>for me to say
+why there was no remonstrance.</p>
+<p>Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon&rsquo;s plays, under
+his own name, with a slight difference in spelling, to his
+company.&nbsp; It was as much his interest, in that case, to
+protest when Bacon&rsquo;s pen-name was taken in vain, as if he
+had spelled his own surname with an <i>a</i> in the second
+syllable.</p>
+<p>There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice.
+<a name="citation37a"></a><a href="#footnote37a"
+class="citation">[37a]</a>&nbsp; In 1599 Jaggard published
+&ldquo;<i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>; W.
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Out of twenty poems, five only were by
+W. S.&nbsp; In 1612, Jaggard added two poems by Tom Heywood,
+retaining W. Shakespeare&rsquo;s name as sole author.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Heywood protested&rdquo; in print, &ldquo;and stated that
+<i>Shakespeare</i> was offended, and,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood,
+&ldquo;very probably he was so; but as he was, so I conceive,
+&lsquo;a concealed poet,&rsquo; writing under a <i>nom de
+plume</i>, he seems to have only made known his annoyance through
+the medium of Heywood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was.&nbsp; Turning
+to pp. 348, 349, we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story,
+with this addition, that the author of the poems published by
+Jaggard, &ldquo;to do himself right, hath since published them in
+his own name.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is, W. Shakespeare has since
+published under his own name such pieces of <i>The Passionate
+Pilgrim</i> as <a name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+38</span>are his own.&nbsp; &ldquo;The author, I know,&rdquo;
+adds Heywood, &ldquo;was much offended with Mr. Jaggard that
+(altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his
+name.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published
+W. S.&rsquo;s poems with others <i>not</i> by W. S.?</p>
+<p>How can anyone explain, by any theory?&nbsp; It was as open to
+him in 1599 as in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own
+name, or pen-name.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Here we observe,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, <a
+name="citation38a"></a><a href="#footnote38a"
+class="citation">[38a]</a> &ldquo;that Heywood does nothing to
+identify &lsquo;the author with the player.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This is, we shall see, the eternal argument.&nbsp; Why should
+Heywood, speaking of W. Shakespeare, explain what all the world
+knew?&nbsp; There was no other W. Shakespeare (with or without
+the <i>e</i> and <i>a</i>) but one, the actor, in the world of
+letters of Elizabeth and James.&nbsp; Who the author was Heywood
+himself has told us, elsewhere: the author was&mdash;Will!</p>
+<p>But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name,
+or, when he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or
+anyone to explain.&nbsp; We do not know the nature of the
+circumstances in detail; we do not know that the poet saw hopes
+of stopping the sale of the works falsely attributed to
+him.&nbsp; I do not even feel certain that he had not a finger in
+some of them.&nbsp; Knowing so little, a more soaring wit than
+mine <a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 39</span>might
+fly to the explanation that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; was the
+&ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of Bacon or his unknown
+equivalent, and that he preferred to &ldquo;let sleeping dogs
+lie,&rdquo; or, as Mr. Greenwood might quote the Latin tag, said
+<i>ne moveas Camarinam</i>.</p>
+<h2><a name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>III<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE&mdash;THE SCHOOLING OF
+SHAKESPEARE</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> banner-cry of the Baconians is
+the word &ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo;&nbsp; It is impossible that
+the actor from Stratford (as they think of him, a bookless,
+untutored lad, speaking in <i>patois</i>) should have possessed
+the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by the author
+of the plays and poems.&nbsp; It is impossible that at the little
+Free School of Stratford (if he attended it), he should have
+gained his wide knowledge of the literatures of Greece and
+Rome.&nbsp; To these arguments, the orthodox Stratfordian is apt
+to reply, that he finds in the plays and poems plenty of
+inaccurate general information on classical subjects, information
+in which the whole literature of England then abounded.&nbsp; He
+also finds in the plays some knowledge of certain Latin authors,
+which cannot be proved to have been translated at the date when
+Shakespeare drew on them.&nbsp; How much Latin Shakespeare knew,
+in our opinion, will presently be explained.</p>
+<p>But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must
+say that while the author of the plays had some lore which
+scholars also possessed, <a name="page44"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 44</span>he did not use his knowledge like a
+scholar.&nbsp; We do not see how a scholar could make, as the
+scansion of his blank verse proves that the author did make, the
+second syllable of the name of Posthumus, in <i>Cymbeline</i>,
+<i>long</i>.&nbsp; He must have read a famous line in Horace
+thus,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>Eheu fugaces Posthoome</i>,
+<i>Posthoome</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>which could scarce &rsquo;scape whipping, even at Stratford
+Free School.&nbsp; In the same way he makes the penultimate
+syllable of Andronicus short, equally impossible.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i>, but also appears to credit it to him, as one of
+the older plays which he &ldquo;revised, improved, and
+dressed,&rdquo; <a name="citation44a"></a><a href="#footnote44a"
+class="citation">[44a]</a> and <i>that</i> is taken to have been
+all his &ldquo;authorship&rdquo; in several cases.&nbsp; A
+scholar would have corrected, not accepted, false
+quantities.&nbsp; In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans cite
+Plato and Aristotle in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, while Plato
+and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest
+conceivable date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose
+that a scholar would have permitted to himself the freak, any
+more than that in <i>The Winter&rsquo;s Tale</i> he should have
+borrowed from an earlier novel the absurdity of calling Delphi
+&ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; (a non-existent word), of confusing
+&ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; with Delos, and placing the Delphian Oracle
+in an island.&nbsp; In the same <a name="page45"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 45</span>play the author, quite needlessly,
+makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492&ndash;1546) contemporary
+with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian
+Apollo.&nbsp; This, at least, would not be ignorance.</p>
+<p>We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben&rsquo;s
+inability to refrain from gibes at Shakspere&rsquo;s want of
+scholarship.&nbsp; Rowe, who had traditions of Davenant&rsquo;s,
+tells how, in conversation with Suckling, Davenant, Endymion
+Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on Will&rsquo;s want of
+learning; and how Hales snubbed him.&nbsp; Indeed, Ben could have
+made mirth enough out of <i>The Winter&rsquo;s Tale</i>.&nbsp;
+For, granting to Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation45a"></a><a
+href="#footnote45a" class="citation">[45a]</a> that &ldquo;the
+mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of a much earlier date,
+and under the reign of Ottocar (1255&ndash;78) Bohemia extended
+from the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic,&rdquo; that only
+makes matters far worse.&nbsp; &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; never was a
+place-name; there was no oracle on the isle of
+&ldquo;Delphos&rdquo;; there were no Oracles in 1255&ndash;78
+(<span class="GutSmall">A.D.</span>); and Perdita, who could have
+sat for her portrait to Giulio Romano, was contemporary with an
+Oracle at <i>Delphos</i>, but not with Ottocar.</p>
+<p>There never was so mad a mixture, not even in <i>Ivanhoe</i>;
+not even in <i>Kenilworth</i>.&nbsp; Scott erred deliberately, as
+he says in his prefaces; but Will took the insular oracle of
+Delphos from Greene, inserted Giulio Romano &ldquo;for his
+personal diversion,&rdquo; <a name="page46"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 46</span>never heard of Ottocar (no more than
+I), and made a delightful congeries of errors in gaiety of
+heart.&nbsp; Nobody shall convince me that Francis Bacon was so
+charmingly irresponsible; but I cannot speak so confidently of
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Great Unknown, a severe scholar, but
+perhaps a frisky soul.&nbsp; There was no region called Bohemia
+when the Delphic oracle was in vigour;&mdash;this apology
+(apparently contrived by Sir Edward Sullivan) is the most comic
+of erudite reflections.</p>
+<p>Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita,
+concerning the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was
+carried off by Dis.&nbsp; How could she, brought up in the hut of
+a Bohemian shepherd, know anything of the Rape of
+Proserpine?&nbsp; Why not, as she lived in the days of the
+Delphic Oracle&mdash;and Giulio Romano, and of printed
+ballads.</p>
+<p>It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer,
+brought up among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire,
+should have created the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and
+known the style of his Armado; and understood how dukes and kings
+talk among themselves&mdash;usually in blank verse, it
+appears.</p>
+<p>It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard
+of the &ldquo;obscure&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>!) Court of Navarre; and
+known that at Venice there was a place called the Rialto, and a
+&ldquo;common ferry&rdquo; called &ldquo;the
+tranect.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is impossible that he should have had
+&ldquo;an intimate knowledge of the <a name="page47"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 47</span>castle of Elsinore,&rdquo; though an
+English <i>troupe</i> of actors visited Denmark in 1587.&nbsp; To
+Will all this knowledge was <i>impossible</i>; for these and many
+more exquisite reasons the yokel&rsquo;s authorship of the plays
+is a physical impossibility.&nbsp; But scholars neither invent
+nor tolerate such strange liberties with time and place, with
+history, geography, and common sense.&nbsp; Will Shakspere either
+did not know what was right, or, more probably, did not care, and
+supposed, like Fielding in the old anecdote, that the audience
+&ldquo;would not find it out.&rdquo;&nbsp; How could a scholar do
+any of these things?&nbsp; He was as incapable of them as Ben
+Jonson.&nbsp; Such sins no scholar is inclined to; they have, for
+him, no temptations.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p47ab.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Facsimile of the Autograph Signature &ldquo;By me William
+Shakspeare.&rdquo;  From one of the Three Sheets of his Will,
+dated March 25, 1616.  (From Sir Sidney Lee&rsquo;s
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s Life and Work.  By permission of Messrs.
+Smith, Elder &amp; Co.)"
+title=
+"Facsimile of the Autograph Signature &ldquo;By me William
+Shakspeare.&rdquo;  From one of the Three Sheets of his Will,
+dated March 25, 1616.  (From Sir Sidney Lee&rsquo;s
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s Life and Work.  By permission of Messrs.
+Smith, Elder &amp; Co.)"
+ src="images/p47as.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p47bb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Facsimile of Mark-Signature of John Shakespeare, the
+Poet&rsquo;s Father.  From a Deed of Conveyance, dated January
+26, 1596"
+title=
+"Facsimile of Mark-Signature of John Shakespeare, the
+Poet&rsquo;s Father.  From a Deed of Conveyance, dated January
+26, 1596"
+ src="images/p47bs.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p47cb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Facsimile of Mark-Signature of Judith Shakespeare, the
+Poet&rsquo;s Second Daughter, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Quiney"
+title=
+"Facsimile of Mark-Signature of Judith Shakespeare, the
+Poet&rsquo;s Second Daughter, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Quiney"
+ src="images/p47cs.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>As to Shakspere&rsquo;s schooling, the Baconians point at the
+current ignorance of Stratford-on-Avon, where many topping
+burgesses, even aldermen, &ldquo;made their marks,&rdquo; in
+place of signing their names to documents.&nbsp;
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s father, wife, and daughter &ldquo;made their
+marks,&rdquo; in place of signing.&nbsp; So did Lady Jane Gordon,
+daughter of the Earl of Huntly, when she married the cultivated
+Earl of Bothwell (1566).</p>
+<p>There is no evidence, from a roll of schoolboys at Stratford
+Free Grammar School, about 1564&ndash;77, that any given boy
+attended it; for no roll exists.&nbsp; Consequently there is no
+evidence that Will was a pupil.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the Appendix to Malone&rsquo;s <i>Life of
+Shakespeare</i> will be found two Latin letters, written <a
+name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 48</span>by alumni of
+Stratford School contemporary with Shakespeare,&rdquo; says Mr.
+Collins. <a name="citation48a"></a><a href="#footnote48a"
+class="citation">[48a]</a>&nbsp; But though the writers were
+Stratford boys contemporary with Shakespeare, in later life his
+associates, as there is no roll of pupils&rsquo; names how do we
+know, the Baconians may ask, that these men were educated at
+Stratford School?&nbsp; Why not at Winchester, Eton, St.
+Paul&rsquo;s, or anywhere?&nbsp; Need one reply?</p>
+<p>Mr. Collins goes on, in his simple confiding way, to state
+that &ldquo;one letter is by Abraham Sturley, afterwards an
+alderman of Stratford . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; Pursuing the facts, we
+find that Sturley wrote in Latin to &ldquo;Richard Quiney,
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s friend,&rdquo; who, if he could read
+Sturley&rsquo;s letter, could read Latin.&nbsp; Then <i>young</i>
+Richard Quiney, apparently aged eleven, wrote in Latin to his
+father.&nbsp; If young Richard Quiney be the son of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s friend, Richard Quiney, then, of course, his
+Latin at the age of eleven would only prove that, if he were a
+schoolboy at Stratford, <i>one</i> Stratford boy could write
+Latin in the generation following that of Shakespeare.&nbsp; Thus
+may reason the Baconians.</p>
+<p>Perhaps, however, we may say that if Stratford boys
+contemporary with Shakspere, in his own rank and known to him,
+learned Latin, which they retained in manhood, Shakspere, if he
+went to school with them, may have done as much.</p>
+<p>Concerning the school, a Free Grammar School, <a
+name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 49</span>we know that
+during Shakespeare&rsquo;s boyhood the Mastership was not
+disdained by Walter Roche, perhaps a Fellow of what was then the
+most progressive College in learning of those at Oxford, namely,
+Corpus Christi.&nbsp; That Shakespeare could have been his pupil
+is uncertain; the dates are rather difficult.&nbsp; I think it
+probable that he was not, and we do not know the qualifications
+of the two or three succeeding Masters.</p>
+<p>As to the methods of teaching and the books read at Grammar
+Schools, abundance of information has been collected.&nbsp; We
+know what the use was in one very good school, Ipswich, from
+1528; in another in 1611; but as we do not possess any special
+information about Stratford School, Mr. Greenwood opposes the
+admission of evidence from other academies.&nbsp; A man might
+think that, however much the quality of the teaching varied in
+various free schools, the nominal curriculum would be fairly
+uniform.</p>
+<p>As to the teacher, a good endowment would be apt to attract a
+capable man.&nbsp; What was the endowment of Stratford
+School?&nbsp; It was derived from the bequest of Thomas Jolyffe
+(died 1482), a bequest of lands in Stratford and Dodwell, and
+before the Reformation the Brethren of the Guild were &ldquo;to
+find a priest fit and able in knowledge to teach grammar freely
+to all scholars coming to him, taking nothing for their teaching
+. . . &rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;The Founder&rsquo;s liberal endowment
+made it possible to secure an income for the Master by
+deed.&nbsp; <a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+50</span>Under the Reformation, Somerset&rsquo;s Commission found
+that the School Master had &pound;10 yearly by patent; the school
+was well conducted, and was not confiscated.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation50a"></a><a href="#footnote50a"
+class="citation">[50a]</a></p>
+<p>Baconians can compare the yearly &pound;20 (the salary in
+1570&ndash;6, which then went much further than it does now) with
+the incomes of other masters of Grammar Schools, and thereby find
+out if the Head-Master was very cheap.&nbsp; Mr. Elton (who knew
+his subject intimately) calls the provision
+&ldquo;liberal.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Head-Master of Westminster had
+&pound;20 and a house.</p>
+<p>As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions
+were asked and answered in Latin.&nbsp; This method, according to
+Dr. Rouse of Perse School, brings boys on much more rapidly than
+does our current fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts
+vary in opinion.&nbsp; The method, I conceive, should give a
+pupil a vocabulary.&nbsp; Lilly&rsquo;s Latin Grammar was
+universally used, and was learned by rote, as by George Borrow,
+in the last century.&nbsp; See <i>Lavengro</i> for details.&nbsp;
+Conversation books, <i>Sententi&aelig; Pueriles</i>, were in use;
+with easy books, such as Corderius&rsquo;s <i>Colloquia</i>, and
+so on, for boys were taught to <i>speak</i> Latin, the common
+language of the educated in Europe.&nbsp; Waifs of the Armada,
+Spaniards wrecked on the Irish coast, met &ldquo;a savage who
+knew Latin,&rdquo; and thus could converse with him.&nbsp; The
+Eclogues of <a name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+51</span>Mantuanus, a Latin poet of the Renaissance (the
+&ldquo;Old Mantuan&rdquo; of <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost</i>), were used, with Erasmus&rsquo;s <i>Colloquia</i>, and,
+says Mr. Collins, &ldquo;such books as Ovid&rsquo;s
+Metamorphoses&rdquo; (and other works of his), &ldquo;the
+&AElig;neid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and
+portions of C&aelig;sar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pro-di-gi-ous!&rdquo; exclaims Mr. Greenwood, <a
+name="citation51a"></a><a href="#footnote51a"
+class="citation">[51a]</a> referring to what Mr. Collins says
+Will had read at school.&nbsp; But precocious Latinity was not
+thought &ldquo;prodigious&rdquo; in an age when nothing but Latin
+was taught to boys&mdash;not even cricket.&nbsp; Nor is it to be
+supposed that every boy read in all of these authors, still less
+read all of their works, but these were the works of which
+portions were read.&nbsp; It is not prodigious.&nbsp; I myself,
+according to my class-master, was &ldquo;a bad and careless
+little boy&rdquo; at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well
+remember reading in Ovid and C&aelig;sar, and Sallust, while the
+rest of my time was devoted to the total neglect of the
+mathematics, English &ldquo;as she was taught,&rdquo; History,
+and whatsoever else was expected from me.&nbsp;
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s time was not thus frittered away; Latin was
+all he learned (if he went to school), and, as he was (on my
+theory) a very clever, imaginative kind of boy, I can conceive
+that he was intensely interested in the stories told by Ovid, and
+in Catiline&rsquo;s Conspiracy (thrilling, if you know your
+Sallust); and if his interest were once aroused, he would make
+rapid progress.&nbsp; My own early <a name="page52"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 52</span>hatred of Greek was hissing and
+malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was changed.&nbsp;
+One was intensely interested!</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr.
+Halliwell-Phillipps, <a name="citation52a"></a><a
+href="#footnote52a" class="citation">[52a]</a>
+&ldquo;Lilly&rsquo;s Grammar, and a few classical works chained
+to the desks of the free schools.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins
+himself gives but &ldquo;a few classical books,&rdquo; of which
+<i>portions</i> were read.&nbsp; The chains were in all the free
+schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right.&nbsp; The chains,
+if authentic, do not count as objections.</p>
+<p>Here it must be noted that Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s opinion of
+Will&rsquo;s knowledge and attainments is not easily to be
+ascertained with precision.&nbsp; He sees, of course, that the
+pretension of the extreme Baconians&mdash;Will could not even
+write his name&mdash;is absurd.&nbsp; If he could not write, he
+could not pass as the author.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood &ldquo;fears
+that the arguments&rdquo; (of a most extreme Baconian)
+&ldquo;would drive many wandering sheep back to the Stratfordian
+fold.&rdquo; <a name="citation52b"></a><a href="#footnote52b"
+class="citation">[52b]</a></p>
+<p>He has therefore to find a <i>via media</i>, to present, as
+the pseudo-author, a Will who possessed neither books nor
+manuscripts when he made his Testament; a rustic, bookless Will,
+speaking a patois, who could none the less pass himself off as
+the author.&nbsp; So &ldquo;I think it highly probable,&rdquo;
+says Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;that he attended <a
+name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 53</span>the Grammar
+School at Stratford for four or five years, and that, later in
+life, after some years in London, he was probably able to
+&lsquo;bumbast out a line,&rsquo; and perhaps to pose as
+&lsquo;Poet-Ape who would be thought our chief.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a
+name="citation53a"></a><a href="#footnote53a"
+class="citation">[53a]</a>&nbsp; Again, &ldquo;He had had but
+little schooling; he had &lsquo;small Latin and less
+Greek&rsquo;; but he was a good <i>Johannes Factotum</i>, he
+could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, &lsquo;bumbast out a
+blank verse.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation53b"></a><a
+href="#footnote53b" class="citation">[53b]</a></p>
+<p>But this is almost to abandon Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+case.&nbsp; Will appears to me to be now perilously near
+acceptance as Greene&rsquo;s &ldquo;Shake-scene,&rdquo; who was a
+formidable rival to Greene&rsquo;s three professional
+playwrights: and quite as near to Ben&rsquo;s Poet-Ape
+&ldquo;that would be thought our chief,&rdquo; who began by
+re-making old plays; then won &ldquo;some little wealth and
+credit on the scene,&rdquo; who had his &ldquo;works&rdquo;
+printed (for Ben expects them to reach posterity), and whom Ben
+accused of plagiarism from himself and his contemporaries.&nbsp;
+But this Shake-scene, this Poet-Ape, is merely our Will
+Shakespeare as described by bitterly jealous and envious
+rivals.&nbsp; Where are now the &ldquo;works&rdquo; of
+&ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; if they are not the works of Shakespeare
+which Ben so nobly applauded later, if they are not in the blank
+verse of Greene&rsquo;s Shake-scene?&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays&rdquo; we call them.</p>
+<p><i>When</i> was it &ldquo;necessary&rdquo; for the
+&ldquo;Stratford <a name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+54</span>rustic&rdquo; to &ldquo;bumbast out a blank
+verse&rdquo;?&nbsp; Where are the blank verses which he bumbasted
+out?&nbsp; For what purposes were they bumbasted?&nbsp; By 1592
+&ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; was ambitious, and thought his blank
+verse as good as the best that Greene&rsquo;s friends, including
+Marlowe, could write.&nbsp; He had plenty of time to practise
+before the date when, as Ben wrote, &ldquo;he would be thought
+our chief.&rdquo;&nbsp; He would not cease to do that in which he
+conceived himself to excel; to write for the stage.</p>
+<p>When once Mr. Greenwood deems it &ldquo;highly probable&rdquo;
+that Will had four or five years of education at a Latin school,
+Will has as much of &ldquo;grounding&rdquo; in Latin, I think, as
+would account for all the knowledge of the Roman tongue which he
+displays.&nbsp; His amount of teaching at school would carry and
+tempt even a boy who was merely clever, and loved to read
+romantic tales and comic plays, into Ovid and
+Plautus&mdash;English books being to him not very accessible.</p>
+<p>Here I may speak from my own memories, for though utterly idle
+where set school tasks were concerned, I tried very early to
+worry the sense out of Aristophanes&mdash;because he was said to
+contain good reading.</p>
+<p>To this amount of taste and curiosity, nowise unexampled in an
+ordinary clever boy, add <i>Genius</i>, and I feel no difficulty
+as to Will&rsquo;s &ldquo;learning,&rdquo; such as, at best, it
+was.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Stratfordian,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood,
+&ldquo;will ingeminate &lsquo;Genius!&nbsp; <a
+name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+55</span>Genius!&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation55a"></a><a
+href="#footnote55a" class="citation">[55a]</a>&nbsp; I <i>do</i>
+say &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; and stand by it.&nbsp; The ordinary
+clever boy, in the supposed circumstances, could read and admire
+his Ovid (though Shakespeare used cribs also), the man of genius
+could write <i>Venus and Adonis</i>.</p>
+<p>Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh
+heavily on bookless Will&rsquo;s rusticity and patois.&nbsp;
+Accepting Ben Jonson&rsquo;s account of his &ldquo;excellent
+phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he
+flowed with that facility . . . ,&rdquo; accepting the tradition
+of his lively wit; admitting that he had some Latin and
+literature, I would find in him a sufficiently plausible mask for
+that immense Unknown with a strange taste for furbishing up older
+plays.&nbsp; I would merely deny to Will his <i>genius</i>, and
+hand <i>that</i> over to Bacon&mdash;or Bungay.&nbsp; Believe me,
+Mr. Greenwood, this is your easiest way!&mdash;perhaps this
+<i>is</i> your way?&mdash;the plot of the unscrupulous Will, and
+of your astute Bungay, might thus more conceivably escape
+detection from the pack of envious playwrights.</p>
+<p>According to &ldquo;all tradition,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood,
+Shakespeare was taken from school at the age of thirteen.&nbsp;
+Those late long-descended traditions of Shakespeare&rsquo;s youth
+are of little value as evidence; but, if it pleases Mr.
+Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument, accept the whole of
+them.&nbsp; Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose among the
+traditions: all depends on the genealogical <a
+name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>steps by
+which they reach us, as far as these can be discovered. <a
+name="citation56a"></a><a href="#footnote56a"
+class="citation">[56a]</a></p>
+<p>According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in
+1680, an opinion concerning Shakspere&rsquo;s education reached
+him.&nbsp; It came thus; there had been an actor in
+Shakspere&rsquo;s company, one Phillips, who, dying in 1605, left
+to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling piece of gold; and the
+same &ldquo;to my servant, Christopher Beeston.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Christopher&rsquo;s son, William, in 1640, became deputy to
+Davenant in the management of &ldquo;the King&rsquo;s and
+Queen&rsquo;s Young Company&rdquo;, and through Beeston,
+according to Aubrey, Davenant learned; through Beeston Aubrey
+learned, that Shakespeare &ldquo;understood Latin pretty well,
+for he had been in his younger days a school-master in the
+country.&rdquo;&nbsp; Aubrey writes that &ldquo;old Mr. Beeston,
+whom Mr. Dryden calls &lsquo;the chronicle of the
+stage,&rsquo;&rdquo; died in 1682. <a name="citation56b"></a><a
+href="#footnote56b" class="citation">[56b]</a></p>
+<p>This is a fair example of the genealogy of the
+traditions.&nbsp; Phillips, a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605,
+leaving a servant, Christopher Beeston (he, too, was a
+versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682; he is &ldquo;the
+chronicle of the stage.&rdquo;&nbsp; Through him Davenant gets
+the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere
+&ldquo;knew Latin pretty well,&rdquo; and had been a rural <a
+name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+57</span>dominie.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a
+name="citation57a"></a><a href="#footnote57a"
+class="citation">[57a]</a> devotes much space to disparaging
+Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority, <i>moult
+s&rsquo;en faut</i>), but Mr. Greenwood here says not a word as
+to the steps in the descent of the tradition.&nbsp; He frequently
+repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration than I
+like.&nbsp; He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p. 105,
+but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say
+that &ldquo;Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor,
+as his authority.&rdquo;&nbsp; On p. 209 he dismisses the
+anecdote (which does not suit his book) as &ldquo;a mere
+myth.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>He</i> knows, <i>he</i> knows&rdquo;
+which traditions are mythical, and which possess a certain
+historical value.</p>
+<p>My own opinion is that Shakspere did &ldquo;know Latin pretty
+well,&rdquo; and was no <i>scholar</i>, as his contemporaries
+reckoned scholarship.&nbsp; He left school, if tradition speak
+true, by a year later than the age, twelve, when Bacon went to
+Cambridge.&nbsp; Will, a clever kind of lad (on my theory), left
+school at an age when some other clever lads became
+freshmen.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may
+have heard as Bishop of Salisbury under William III) took his
+degree at the age of fourteen.</p>
+<p>Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with
+nothing to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the
+colloquial, I conceive him to have discovered that, in Ovid
+especially, <a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+58</span>were to be found the most wonderful and delightful
+stories, and poetry which could not but please his &ldquo;green
+unknowing youth.&rdquo;&nbsp; In the years before he left
+Stratford, and after he left school (1577&ndash;87?), I can
+easily suppose that he was not <i>always</i> butchering calves,
+poaching, and making love; and that, if he could get books in no
+other way, this graceless fellow might be detected on a summer
+evening, knitting his brows over the stories and jests of the
+chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom desk.&nbsp; <i>Moi
+qui parle</i>, I am no genius; but stories, romance, and humour
+would certainly have dragged me back to the old desks&mdash;if
+better might not be, and why not Shakspere?&nbsp; Put yourself in
+his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad, you
+liked to steal away into the world of romance, into
+fairyland.</p>
+<p>If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the
+plays) was a marvel of genius.&nbsp; But I am not here claiming
+for him genius, but merely stating my opinion that if he were
+fond of stories and romance, had no English books of poetry and
+romance, and had acquired as much power of reading Latin as a
+lively, curious boy could easily gain in four years of
+exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies as he
+pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.</p>
+<p>I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the
+Baconians insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a
+few years he was at a <a name="page59"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 59</span>Latin school.&nbsp; I credit the
+graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt acquisitiveness,
+the love of poetry and romance, which the author of the plays
+must have possessed in youth.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tradition says nothing
+of all that,&rdquo; the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he
+likes, turn to my reply in <i>The Traditional Shakespeare</i>. <a
+name="citation59a"></a><a href="#footnote59a"
+class="citation">[59a]</a>&nbsp; Meanwhile, how can you expect
+old clerks and sextons, a century after date, in a place where
+literature was <i>not</i> of supreme interest, to retain a
+tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did), in
+circumstances of privacy?&nbsp; As far as I am able to judge, had
+I been a boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught
+nothing but Latin, and had little or no access to English books
+of poetry and romance, I should have acquired about the same
+amount of Latin as I suppose Shakspere to have possessed.&nbsp;
+Yet I could scarcely, like him, have made the second syllable in
+&ldquo;Posthumus&rdquo; long!&nbsp; Sir Walter Scott, however,
+was guilty of similar false quantities: he and Shakspere were
+about equally scholarly.</p>
+<p>I suppose, then, that Shakspere&rsquo;s &ldquo;small
+Latin&rdquo; (as Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the
+works of the Roman clerks; to read sufficient for his uses.&nbsp;
+As a fact, he made use of English translations, and also of Latin
+texts.&nbsp; Scholars like Bacon do not use bad translations of
+easy Latin authors.&nbsp; If Bacon wanted Plutarch, he went to
+Plutarch in Greek, not to an English <a name="page60"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 60</span>translation of a French translation
+of a Latin translation.</p>
+<p>Some works of Shakespeare, the <i>Lucrece</i>, for example,
+and <i>The Comedy of Errors</i> (if he were not working over an
+earlier canvas from a more learned hand), and other passages,
+show knowledge of Latin texts which in his day had not appeared
+in published translations, or had not been translated at all as
+far as we know.&nbsp; In my opinion Will had Latin enough to
+puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult, for
+himself.&nbsp; He could also &ldquo;get a construe,&rdquo; when
+in London, or help in reading, from a more academic acquaintance:
+or buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor scholar.&nbsp;
+No contemporary calls him scholarly; the generation of men who
+were small boys when he died held him for no scholar.&nbsp; The
+current English literature of his day was saturated with every
+kind of classical information; its readers, even if Latinless,
+knew, or might know a world of lore with which the modern man is
+seldom acquainted.&nbsp; The ignorant Baconian marvels: the
+classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with
+Elizabethan literature is amazed.&nbsp; Really there is nothing
+worthy of their wonder.</p>
+<p>Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call
+him &ldquo;<i>learned</i>&rdquo;?&nbsp; He is
+&ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; &ldquo;honey-tongued,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;mellifluous,&rdquo; and so forth, but I ask for any
+contemporary who flattered him with the compliment of
+&ldquo;learned.&rdquo;&nbsp; What <a name="page61"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 61</span>Ben Jonson thought of his learning
+(but Ben&rsquo;s standard was very high), what Milton and Fuller,
+boys of eight when he died, thought of his learning, we
+know.&nbsp; They thought him &ldquo;Fancy&rsquo;s child&rdquo;
+(Milton) and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with
+&ldquo;small Latin and less Greek&rdquo; (Jonson).&nbsp; They
+speak of Shakespeare the author and actor; not yet had any man
+divided the persons.</p>
+<p>Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in
+the classics.&nbsp; They were not usually, however, scholars in
+the same sense as our modern scholarly poets and men of letters;
+such as Mr. Swinburne among the dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir
+Gilbert Murray&mdash;if I may be pardoned for mentioning
+contemporary names.&nbsp; But Elizabethan scholarly poets, and
+Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned.&nbsp; Perhaps few
+modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.&nbsp;
+The opinion of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even
+he thought Shakespeare&rsquo;s scholarship &ldquo;inexact,&rdquo;
+as we shall see.</p>
+<p>I conceive that Shakspere &ldquo;knew Latin pretty
+well,&rdquo; and, on Ben Jonson&rsquo;s evidence, he knew
+&ldquo;less Greek.&rdquo;&nbsp; That he knew <i>any</i> Greek is
+surprising.&nbsp; Apparently he did, to judge from Ben&rsquo;s
+words.&nbsp; My attitude must, to the Baconians, seem frivolous,
+vexatious, and evasive.&nbsp; I cannot pretend to know what was
+Shakspere&rsquo;s precise amount of proficiency in Latin when he
+was writing the plays.&nbsp; That between his own knowledge, and
+construes given to him, he might easily <a
+name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 62</span>get at the
+meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly
+knew, I believe.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood says &ldquo;the amount of reading which the lad
+Shakspere must have done, and assimilated, during his brief
+sojourn at the Free School is positively amazing.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation62a"></a><a href="#footnote62a"
+class="citation">[62a]</a>&nbsp; But I have shown how an
+imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and
+romances, might continue to read Latin &ldquo;for human
+pleasure&rdquo; after he left school.&nbsp; As a professional
+writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they
+are rare in literary society, he might read more, and be helped
+in his reading.&nbsp; Any clever man might do as much, not to
+speak of a man of genius.&nbsp; &ldquo;And yet, alas, there is no
+record or tradition of all this prodigious industry. . . .
+&rdquo;&nbsp; I am not speaking of &ldquo;prodigious
+industry,&rdquo; and of that&mdash;at school.&nbsp; In a region
+so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr. Greenwood
+ought not to expect traditions of Will&rsquo;s early reading
+(even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to
+exist, from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the
+memories of the sons and grandsons of country people who cared
+for none of these things.&nbsp; The thing is not reasonable. <a
+name="citation62b"></a><a href="#footnote62b"
+class="citation">[62b]</a></p>
+<p>Let me take one example <a name="citation62c"></a><a
+href="#footnote62c" class="citation">[62c]</a> of what Mr. E. A.
+Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s debt to Seneca&rsquo;s then untranslated <a
+name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 63</span>paper <i>De
+Clementia</i> (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I).&nbsp; It inspires
+Portia&rsquo;s speech about Mercy.&nbsp; Here I give a version of
+the Latin.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King
+or chief magistrate (<i>principem</i>) . . . No one can think of
+anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will
+be confessed the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is
+exhibited in the higher office . . . But if the placable and just
+gods punish not instantly with their thunderbolts the sins of the
+powerful, how much more just it is that a man set over men should
+gently exercise his power.&nbsp; What?&nbsp; Holds not he the
+place nearest to the gods, who, bearing himself like the gods, is
+kind, and generous, and uses his power for the better? . .
+.&nbsp; Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome would be,
+were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would
+absolve.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in
+Portia&rsquo;s speech:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Consider
+this<br />
+That in the course of Justice none of us<br />
+Should see salvation.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires
+Portia&rsquo;s eloquence.</p>
+<p>Now take Portia:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The quality of Mercy is not
+strain&rsquo;d;<br />
+It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven<br />
+Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;<br />
+It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>(Not much Seneca, so far!)</p>
+<blockquote><p><a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+64</span>&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it
+becomes<br />
+The thron&egrave;d monarch better than his crown;<br />
+His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,<br />
+The attribute to awe and majesty,<br />
+Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;<br />
+But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,<br />
+It is enthron&egrave;d in the hearts of kings,<br />
+It is an attribute to God himself;<br />
+And earthly power doth then show likest God&rsquo;s,<br />
+When mercy seasons justice . . . &rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation,
+already cited, and theological in origin.</p>
+<p>Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these
+reflections, without having read Seneca&rsquo;s <i>De
+Clementia</i>, whether, if he could not conceive the ideas
+&ldquo;out of his own head,&rdquo; he might not hear
+Seneca&rsquo;s words translated in a sermon, or in conversation,
+or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide
+for himself.&nbsp; Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out
+what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay
+of the tutor of Nero.</p>
+<p>My view of Shakespeare&rsquo;s Latinity is much like that of
+Sir Walter Raleigh. <a name="citation64a"></a><a
+href="#footnote64a" class="citation">[64a]</a>&nbsp; As far as I
+am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach
+the subject, and who have had a classical education.&nbsp; An
+exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are
+discussed in the following chapter.</p>
+<p>In his youth, and in the country, Will could <a
+name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>do what Hogg
+and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was
+self-taught, even in writing).&nbsp; Will could pick up
+traditional, oral, popular literature.&nbsp; &ldquo;His
+plays,&rdquo; says Sir Walter Raleigh, &ldquo;are extraordinarily
+rich in the floating debris of popular literature,&mdash;scraps
+and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and
+proverbs.&nbsp; In this respect he is notable even among his
+contemporaries. . . .&nbsp; Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and
+Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in <i>Lear</i> and the
+Grave-digger in <i>Hamlet</i>, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are
+all alike singers of old songs. . . . &rdquo; <a
+name="citation65a"></a><a href="#footnote65a"
+class="citation">[65a]</a>&nbsp; He is rich in rural proverbs
+<i>not</i> recorded in Bacon&rsquo;s <i>Promus</i>.</p>
+<p>Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale,
+&ldquo;was making himself all the time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many
+now obsolete rural words.&nbsp; Bacon, too, may have had a memory
+rich in all the tags of song, ballad, story, and
+<i>dicton</i>.&nbsp; But so may Shakespeare.</p>
+<h2><a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 67</span>IV<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S
+LEARNING</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> Shakspere, whether
+&ldquo;scholar&rdquo; or not, had a very wide and deep knowledge
+both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole field of
+the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr. Greenwood
+seems to admire in that &ldquo;violent Stratfordian,&rdquo; Mr.
+Churton Collins. <a name="citation69a"></a><a href="#footnote69a"
+class="citation">[69a]</a>&nbsp; I think that Mr. Collins did not
+persuade classical scholars who have never given a thought to the
+Baconian belief, but who consider on their merits the questions:
+Does Shakespeare show wide classical knowledge?&nbsp; Does he use
+his knowledge as a scholar would use it?</p>
+<p>My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very
+wide reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+It was his native tendency to find coincidences in poetic
+passages (which, to some, to me for example, did not often seem
+coincidental); and to explain coincidences by conscious or
+subconscious borrowing.&nbsp; One remarked in him these
+tendencies long before he wrote on the classical acquirements of
+Shakespeare.</p>
+<p><a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>While
+Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of
+authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as
+undesigned coincidences.&nbsp; The question is of the widest
+range.&nbsp; Some inquirers explain the often minute coincidences
+in myths, popular tales, proverbs, and riddles, found all over
+the world, by diffusion from a single centre (usually
+India).&nbsp; Others, like myself, do not deny cases of
+transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and independent,
+though coincident invention.&nbsp; I do not believe that the
+Arunta of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central
+feature of the myth of Isis and Osiris.</p>
+<p>It is not on Shakespeare&rsquo;s use, now and then, of Greek
+and Latin models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr.
+Collins himself, and not earlier remarked, that he bases his
+belief in the saturation of Shakespeare&rsquo;s mind with Roman
+and Athenian literature.&nbsp; Consequently we can only do
+justice to Mr. Collins&rsquo;s system, if we compare example
+after example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+borrowing.&nbsp; This is a long and irksome task; and the only
+fair plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins&rsquo;s
+<i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>, compare the Greek and Roman texts,
+and weigh each example of supposed borrowing for himself.&nbsp;
+Baconians must delight in this labour.</p>
+<p>I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for
+Shakespeare to obtain a view of the <a name="page71"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 71</span>manuscript translation of plays of
+Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use
+the <i>Men&aelig;chmi</i> as the model of <i>The Comedy of
+Errors</i>.&nbsp; He does not borrow phrases from it, as he does
+from North&rsquo;s <i>Plutarch</i>.</p>
+<p><i>Venus and Adonis</i> owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for
+three purple patches, scattered in different parts of the
+<i>Metamorphoses</i>.&nbsp; <i>Lucrece</i> is based on the then
+untranslated <i>Fasti</i> of Ovid.&nbsp; I do not think
+Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or
+too proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor
+young University man in London.&nbsp; That is a simple and
+natural means by which he could help himself when in search of a
+subject for a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.</p>
+<p>Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+wide and profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the
+remark: &ldquo;Nothing which Shakespeare has left us warrants us
+in pronouncing with certainty that he read the Greek classics in
+the original, or even that he possessed enough Greek to follow
+the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek text.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation71a"></a><a href="#footnote71a"
+class="citation">[71a]</a>&nbsp; In that case, how did
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins
+says it did, with Greek <i>idioms</i>, while he only knew the
+Greek plays through Latin translations?</p>
+<p>However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s close familiarity <a name="page72"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 72</span>with Latin and with Greek dramatic
+literature by a method of which he knows the
+perils&mdash;&ldquo;it is always perilous to infer direct
+imitation from parallel passages which may be mere
+coincidences.&rdquo; <a name="citation72a"></a><a
+href="#footnote72a" class="citation">[72a]</a>&nbsp; Yet this
+method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of
+success every reader must judge for himself.</p>
+<p>He thinks it &ldquo;surely not unlikely&rdquo; that
+Polonius&rsquo;s</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Neither a borrower nor a lender be:<br />
+For loan oft loses both itself and friend,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus
+(<i>Trinummus</i>, iv. 3).&nbsp; Why, Polonius is a coiner of
+commonplaces, and if ever there were a well-known reflection from
+experience it is this of the borrowers and lenders.</p>
+<p>Next, take this of Plautus (<i>Pseudolus</i>, I, iv.
+7&ndash;10), &ldquo;But just as the poet when he has taken up his
+tablets seeks what exists nowhere among men, and yet finds it,
+and makes that like truth which is mere fiction.&rdquo;&nbsp; We
+are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus&rsquo;s theory
+of the origin of the belief in fairies:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;And as imagination bodies forth<br />
+The <i>forms</i> of things unknown, the poet&rsquo;s pen<br />
+Turns them to <i>shapes</i>, and gives to airy nothing<br />
+A local habitation and a name.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth <i>forms</i>,
+and the poet&rsquo;s pen turns them to <a name="page73"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 73</span><i>shapes</i>.&nbsp; But to suppose
+that Shakespeare here borrowed from Plautus appears highly
+superfluous.</p>
+<p>These are samples of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s methods
+throughout.</p>
+<p>Of Terence there were translations&mdash;first in part; later,
+in 1598, of the whole.&nbsp; Of Seneca there was an English
+version (1581).&nbsp; Mr. Collins labours to show that one
+passage &ldquo;almost certainly&rdquo; implies
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s use of the Latin; but it was used &ldquo;by
+an inexact scholar,&rdquo;&mdash;a terribly inexact scholar, if
+he thought that &ldquo;<i>alienus</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;what belongs
+to another&rdquo;) meant &ldquo;slippery&rdquo;!</p>
+<p>Most of the passages are from plays (<i>Titus Andronicus</i>
+and <i>Henry VI</i>, i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies
+(usually) to <i>his</i> author, the Great Unknown.&nbsp;
+Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s to resemble Seneca&rsquo;s <i>Latin</i>
+style: Shakespeare, then, took up Greek tragedy in later life;
+after the early period when he dealt with Seneca.&nbsp; Here is a
+sample of borrowing from Horace, &ldquo;<i>Persicos odi puer
+apparatus</i>&rdquo; (<i>Odes</i>. I, xxxviii. I).&nbsp; Mr.
+Collins quotes <i>Lear</i> (III, vi. 85) thus, &ldquo;You will
+say they are <i>Persian attire</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Really, Lear in
+his wild way says to Edgar, &ldquo;I do not like the fashion of
+your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them be
+changed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins changes this into &ldquo;you
+will say they are <i>Persian attire</i>,&rdquo; a phrase
+&ldquo;which could only have occurred to a <a
+name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>classical
+scholar.&rdquo;&nbsp; The phrase is not in Shakespeare, and
+Lear&rsquo;s wandering mind might as easily select
+&ldquo;Persian&rdquo; as any other absurdity.</p>
+<p>So it is throughout.&nbsp; Two great poets write on the fear
+of death, on the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and
+recombination in nature, on old age; they have ideas in common,
+obvious ideas, glorified by poetry,&mdash;and Shakespeare, we are
+told, is borrowing from Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic
+leaves his reader to find out and study the Latin passages which
+he does not quote.&nbsp; So arbitrary is taste in these matters
+that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently, finds
+Shakespeare putting a thought from the <i>Alcibiades I</i> of
+Plato into the mouth of Achilles in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,
+while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is from
+Seneca&mdash;where Mr. Collins does not find &ldquo;the smallest
+parallel.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author
+of <i>Troilus</i> makes Ulysses quote Plato as &ldquo;the
+author&rdquo; of a remark, and makes Achilles take up the
+quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.</p>
+<p>Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but
+Plato are taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have
+been read by the Ach&aelig;ans!</p>
+<p>There were Latin translations of Plato; the <i>Alcibiades
+I</i> was published apart, from Ficinus&rsquo; version, in 1560,
+with the sub-title, <i>Concerning the Nature of Man</i>.&nbsp;
+Who had read it?&mdash;Shakespeare, <a name="page75"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 75</span>or one of the two authors (Dekker and
+Chettle) of another <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> (now lost), or
+Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Unknown?&nbsp; Which of these
+Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long
+before Homer?&nbsp; Which of them followed the Ionic and
+medi&aelig;val anti-Ach&aelig;an view of Homer&rsquo;s heroes, as
+given in the Troy Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad,
+Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition
+abhors?&nbsp; <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> is indeed a mystery,
+but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus&rsquo; version of
+the <i>Alcibiades</i>; <a name="citation75a"></a><a
+href="#footnote75a" class="citation">[75a]</a> and yet made the
+monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato before the
+Trojan war.&nbsp; &ldquo;That was his fun,&rdquo; as Charles Lamb
+said in another connection.</p>
+<p>Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the
+&ldquo;small Latin&rdquo; with which his age (like myself)
+credited Shakespeare.&nbsp; He could read Latin, Mr. Collins
+thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads French&mdash;that
+is, as easily as he reads English.&nbsp; Still further,
+Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with
+the Greek drama &ldquo;that the characteristics which
+differentiate his work from the work of his contemporaries and
+recall in essentials the work of the Greek dramatists are
+actually attributable to these dramatists.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University
+wits, as far as I remember, <a name="page76"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 76</span>like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do
+not show much acquaintance with Euripides, &AElig;schylus,
+Sophocles, and do not often remind us of these masters.&nbsp;
+Shakespeare does remind us of them&mdash;the only question is, do
+the resemblances arise from his possession of a genius akin to
+that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all the
+treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling
+up through the wells of Avon?</p>
+<p>But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, <i>cannot</i>
+be demonstrated) that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic
+tragedians?&nbsp; He begins by saying that he will not bottom his
+case &ldquo;on the ground of parallels in sentiment and
+reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely to
+be&rdquo; (fortuitous) &ldquo;coincidences.&rdquo;&nbsp; Three
+pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore
+follow.&nbsp; &ldquo;Curiously close similarities of
+expression&rdquo; are also barred.&nbsp; Four pages of examples
+therefore follow, from Sophocles and &AElig;schylus, plays and
+fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!).&nbsp; Again,
+&ldquo;identities of sentiment under similar circumstances&rdquo;
+are not to be cited; two pages <i>are</i> cited; and
+&ldquo;similarities, however striking they may be in metaphorical
+expression,&rdquo; cannot safely be used; several pages of them
+follow.</p>
+<p>Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the <i>Aias</i> of
+Sophocles, and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i>, which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as
+non-Shakespearean, <a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+77</span>or not by his unknown great author.&nbsp; <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>, whatever part Shakespeare may have had in it, does
+suggest to me that the author or authors knew of Homer no more
+than the few books of the Iliad, first translated by Chapman and
+published in 1598.&nbsp; But he or they did know the <i>Aias</i>
+of Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did the author of
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.</p>
+<p>Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the
+Greeks are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that
+Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians.&nbsp; &ldquo;We have
+obviously to be on our guard&rdquo; <a name="citation77a"></a><a
+href="#footnote77a" class="citation">[77a]</a> against three
+kinds of such parallels, which &ldquo;may be mere
+coincidences,&rdquo; <a name="citation77b"></a><a
+href="#footnote77b" class="citation">[77b]</a> fortuitous
+coincidences.&nbsp; But these coincidences against which
+&ldquo;we must be on our guard&rdquo; fill sixteen pages (pp.
+46&ndash;63).&nbsp; These pages must necessarily produce a
+considerable effect in the way of persuading the reader that
+Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately as Mr.
+Collins did.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these
+parallels to readers of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s essay.&nbsp; Indeed,
+what more can we do?&nbsp; Who would read through a criticism of
+each instance?&nbsp; Two or three may be given.&nbsp; The Queen
+in <i>Hamlet</i> reminds that prince, grieving for his
+father&rsquo;s death, that &ldquo;all that live must
+die&rdquo;:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;That loss is common to the race,<br />
+And common is the common-place.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 78</span>The
+Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,&mdash;and here is
+a parallel!&nbsp; Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that
+anxious expectation of evil is worse than actual experience
+thereof.&nbsp; Greece agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten
+gains do not thrive, or that it is not lucky to be &ldquo;a corby
+messenger&rdquo; of bad news; or that all goes ill when a man
+acts against his better nature; or that we suffer most from the
+harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is strength in a
+righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea common to
+Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or that,
+having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like
+again,&mdash;and so on as long as you please.&nbsp; Of such
+wisdom are proverbs made, and savages and Europeans have many
+parallel proverbs.&nbsp; <i>Vestigia nulla retrorsum</i> is as
+well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.&nbsp; Manifestly nothing
+in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare was
+saturated in Greek tragedy.&nbsp; But page on page of such facts
+as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of &ldquo;the
+belly-pinched wolf,&rdquo; the other of &ldquo;the empty-bellied
+wolf,&rdquo; are apt to impress the reader&mdash;and verily both
+Shakespeare and &AElig;schylus talk of &ldquo;the heart dancing
+for joy.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins repeats that such things are no
+proof, but he keeps on piling them up.&nbsp; It was a theory of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s time that the apparent ghost of a dead man
+might be an impersonation <a name="page79"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 79</span>of him by the devil.&nbsp; Hamlet
+knows this&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The spirit that I have seen may be the
+devil.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Orestes (<i>Electra</i>, Euripides) asks whether it may not be
+an avenging d&aelig;mon (<i>alastor</i>) in the shape of a god,
+that bids him avenge his father.&nbsp; Is Shakespeare borrowing
+from Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on
+ghosts, such as that of Lavater?</p>
+<p>A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and
+characters in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, and in Euripides, both say
+that Death is her bridegroom.&nbsp; Anyone might say that,
+anywhere, as in the Greek Anthology&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;For Death not for Love hast thou loosened
+thy zone.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such
+parallels.&nbsp; But confessedly, though a parade is made of
+them, they do not prove that Shakespeare constantly read Greek
+tragedies in Latin translations.</p>
+<p>To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in
+such commonplaces: as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun
+of their latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both
+pun on their own names.</p>
+<p>The situations, in <i>Hamlet</i> and the
+<i>Choephor&aelig;</i> and <i>Electra</i>, are so close that
+resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr. Collins
+does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of all:
+the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the
+murder of Agamemnon.</p>
+<p><a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>Now it
+would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels
+between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between
+Homer and <i>Beowulf</i> and the Njal&rsquo;s saga, yet Norsemen
+and the early Irish were not students of Homer!&nbsp; The
+parallel passages in Homer, on one side, and the Old Irish
+<i>Tain Bo Cualgne</i>, and the Anglo-Saxon epics, are so
+numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from Homer has
+actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar.&nbsp; But no
+student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I
+think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court
+minstrels knew Greek.&nbsp; The curious may consult Mr. Munro
+Chadwick&rsquo;s <i>The Heroic Age</i> (1912), especially Chapter
+XV, &ldquo;The Common Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek
+Heroic Poetry,&rdquo; and to what Mr. Chadwick says much might be
+added.</p>
+<p>But, to be short, Mr. Collins&rsquo;s case can only be judged
+by readers of his most interesting <i>Studies in
+Shakespeare</i>.&nbsp; To me, Hamlet&rsquo;s soliloquy on death
+resembles a fragment from the <i>Ph&oelig;nix</i> of Euripides no
+more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the
+text that &ldquo;of death we know nothing&rdquo; are bound to
+do,&mdash;though Shakespeare&rsquo;s are infinitely the
+richer.&nbsp; For Shakespeare&rsquo;s reflections on death, save
+where Christians die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as
+those of the post-&AElig;schylean Greek and early Anglo-Saxon
+poets.&nbsp; In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves,
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s highest and deepest <a
+name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 81</span>musings are
+Greek in tone.&nbsp; But of all English poets he who came nearest
+to Greece in his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing.&nbsp;
+In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in
+relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though
+necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet&rsquo;s
+lines on old age, <i>sine amore jocisque</i>, borrowed from
+Mimnermus!&nbsp; There is such a thing as congruity of
+genius.&nbsp; Mr. Collins states the hypothesis&mdash;not his
+own&mdash;&ldquo;that <i>by a certain natural affinity</i>
+Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well as some of
+the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s long
+array of Greek parallels, I do hold that by &ldquo;natural
+affinity,&rdquo; by congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached
+and resembled the great Athenians.</p>
+<p>One thing seems certain to me.&nbsp; If Shakspere read and
+borrowed from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as
+Mr. Collins knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr.
+Collins&rsquo;s extraordinary tenacity of memory.</p>
+<p>Now if &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; did all that, he was not the
+actor.&nbsp; The author, on Mr. Collins&rsquo;s showing, must
+have been a very sedulous and diligent student of Greek poetry,
+above all of the drama, down to its fragments.&nbsp; The
+Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from Bacon&rsquo;s
+works, that he was such a student.</p>
+<p>Mr. Collins, &ldquo;a violent Stratfordian,&rdquo; overproved
+<a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 82</span>his
+case.&nbsp; If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew
+the Greek tragedians as well as did Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp; If the
+author of the plays were so learned, the actor was not the
+author, in my opinion&mdash;he <i>was</i>, in the opinion of Mr.
+Collins.</p>
+<p>If Shakespeare&rsquo;s spirit and those of Sophocles and
+&AElig;schylus meet, it is because they move on the same heights,
+and thence survey with &ldquo;the poet&rsquo;s sad
+lucidity&rdquo; the same &ldquo;pageant of men&rsquo;s
+miseries.&rdquo;&nbsp; But how dissimilar in expression
+Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of
+Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s parallels.</p>
+<p>Polynices, in the <i>Ph&oelig;niss&aelig;</i> of Euripides
+(504&ndash;506), exclaims:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;To the stars&rsquo; risings, and the
+sun&rsquo;s I&rsquo;d go,<br />
+And dive &rsquo;neath earth,&mdash;if I could do this
+thing,&mdash;<br />
+Possess Heaven&rsquo;s highest boon of sovereignty.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Then compare Hotspur:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap<br
+/>
+To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,<br />
+Or dive into the bottom of the deep,<br />
+Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,<br />
+And pluck up drown&egrave;d honour by the locks,<br />
+So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear<br />
+Without corrival all her dignities.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur&rsquo;s
+mind!&nbsp; Is Shakespeare thinking of the
+<i>Ph&oelig;niss&aelig;</i>, or is he speaking only on the
+promptings of his genius?</p>
+<h2><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 83</span>V<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND
+SOCIETY</span></h2>
+<p>A <span class="smcap">phrase</span> has been used to explain
+the Greek element in Shakespeare&rsquo;s work, namely,
+&ldquo;congruity of genius,&rdquo; which is apt to be resented by
+Baconians.&nbsp; Perhaps they have a right to resent it, for
+&ldquo;genius&rdquo; is hard to define, and genius is invoked by
+some wild wits to explain feats of Shakespeare&rsquo;s which (to
+Baconians) appear &ldquo;miracles.&rdquo;&nbsp; A
+&ldquo;miracle&rdquo; also is notoriously hard to define; but we
+may take it (&ldquo;under all reserves&rdquo;) to stand for the
+occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action which, to
+the speaker who applies the word &ldquo;miracle,&rdquo; seems
+&ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; The speaker therefore says,
+&ldquo;The event is impossible; miracles do not happen: therefore
+the reported event never occurred.&nbsp; The alleged performance,
+the writing of the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a
+miracle, therefore was done by some person or persons other than
+the actor.&rdquo;&nbsp; This idea of the <i>impossibility</i> of
+the player&rsquo;s authorship is the foundation of the Baconian
+edifice.</p>
+<p>I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s view of the young provincial from Warwickshire,
+Will Shakspere.&nbsp; If <a name="page86"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 86</span>Will were what Mr. Greenwood thinks
+he was, then Will&rsquo;s authorship of the plays seems to me,
+&ldquo;humanly speaking,&rdquo; impossible.&nbsp; But then Mr.
+Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance
+that Will <i>may</i> have been, not merely &ldquo;a sharp
+boy&rdquo; but a boy of great parts; and not without a love of
+stories and poetry: a passion which, in a bookless region, could
+only be gratified through folk-song, folk-tale, and such easy
+Latin as he might take the trouble to read.&nbsp; If we add to
+these very unusual but not wholly impossible tastes and
+abilities, that Will <i>may</i> have been a lad of genius, there
+is no more &ldquo;miracle&rdquo; in his case than in other
+supreme examples of genius.&nbsp; &ldquo;But genius cannot work
+miracles, cannot do what is impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; Do what is
+impossible to whom?&nbsp; To the critics, the men of common
+sense.</p>
+<p>Alas, all this way of talking about &ldquo;miracles,&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;the impossible,&rdquo; and &ldquo;genius&rdquo; is
+quite vague and popular.&nbsp; What do we mean by
+&ldquo;genius&rdquo;?&nbsp; The Latin term originally designates,
+not a man&rsquo;s everyday intellect, but a spirit from without
+which inspires him, like the &ldquo;D&aelig;mon,&rdquo; or, in
+Latin, &ldquo;Genius&rdquo; of Socrates, or the <i>lutin</i>
+which rode the pen of Moli&egrave;re.&nbsp; &ldquo;Genius&rdquo;
+is claimed for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford
+monument, erected at latest some six years after his death.&nbsp;
+Following this path of thought we come to
+&ldquo;inspiration&rdquo;: the notion of it, as familiar to
+Australian savages as to any <a name="page87"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 87</span>modern minds, is that, to the poet,
+what he produces is <i>given</i> by some power greater than
+himself, by the <i>Boilyas</i> (spirits) or Pundjel, the Father
+of all.&nbsp; This pal&aelig;olithic psychology, of course, is
+now quite discredited, yet the term &ldquo;genius&rdquo; is still
+(perhaps superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose
+intellectual faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals,
+and who do marvels with means apparently inadequate.</p>
+<p>In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers,
+put&mdash;in place of the Muses or the <i>Boilyas</i>, or the
+Genius&mdash;what they call the &ldquo;Subliminal Self,&rdquo;
+something &ldquo;far more deeply interfused than the everyday
+intellect.&rdquo;&nbsp; This subconscious self, capable of far
+more than the conscious intelligence, is genius.</p>
+<p>On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty,
+only higher in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the
+everyday intellect which, for example, pens this page.</p>
+<p>Thus as soon as we begin to speak of &ldquo;genius,&rdquo; we
+are involved in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical,
+and metaphysical; in difficulties of all sorts not at present to
+be solved either by physiological science or experimental
+psychology, or by psychical research, or by the study of
+heredity.&nbsp; When I speak of &ldquo;the genius of
+Shakespeare,&rdquo; of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc, of Bacon, even of
+Wellington, I possibly have a meaning which is not in all
+respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood, when he uses the term
+&ldquo;genius&rdquo;; <a name="page88"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 88</span>so we are apt to misunderstand each
+other.&nbsp; Yet we all glibly use the term &ldquo;genius,&rdquo;
+without definition and without discussion.</p>
+<p>At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against &ldquo;that
+fool of a word,&rdquo; as Napoleon said,
+&ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; At once, on either side, we
+assume that we know what is possible and what is
+impossible,&mdash;and so pretend to omniscience.</p>
+<p>Thus some &ldquo;Stratfordians,&rdquo; or defenders of the
+actor&rsquo;s authorship, profess to know&mdash;from all the
+signed work of Bacon, and from all that has reached us about
+Bacon&rsquo;s occupations and preoccupations, from 1590 to
+1605&mdash;that the theory of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship of the
+plays is &ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; I, however, do not
+profess this omniscience.</p>
+<p>On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that
+<i>he</i> knows, or thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the
+actor&rsquo;s education, conditions of life, and opportunities,
+argues that the authorship of the actor is
+&ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know
+much more about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations,
+and in his life, than we know about the actor; while about
+&ldquo;the potentialities of genius,&rdquo; we know&mdash;very
+little.</p>
+<p>Thus, with all Bacon&rsquo;s occupations and preoccupations,
+he had, the Baconians will allow, <i>genius</i>.&nbsp; By the
+miracle of genius he <i>may</i> have found time and developed
+inclination, to begin by furbishing up older plays for a company
+of <a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 89</span>actors:
+he did it extremely well, but what a quaint taste for a courtier
+and scholar!&nbsp; The eccentricities of genius <i>may</i>
+account for his choice of a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo;
+which, if he desired concealment, was the last that was likely to
+serve his turn.&nbsp; He may also have divined all the Doll
+Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom, conceivably, he
+did not much frequent.</p>
+<p>I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written
+<i>Hamlet</i> &ldquo;if he had the mind,&rdquo; as Charles Lamb
+said of Wordsworth.&nbsp; Not at all; I am the last to limit the
+potentialities of genius.</p>
+<p>But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will
+Shakspere too had genius in that amazing degree which, in
+<i>Henry V</i>, the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of
+Canterbury describe and discuss in the case of the young
+king.&nbsp; In this passage we perceive that the poet had brooded
+over and been puzzled by the &ldquo;miracle&rdquo; (he uses the
+word) of genius.&nbsp; Says Canterbury speaking of the
+Prince&rsquo;s wild youth,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Never was such a sudden scholar
+made.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>One Baconian objection to Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorship is
+that during his early years in London (say 1587&ndash;92) he was
+&ldquo;such a sudden scholar made&rdquo; in various things.</p>
+<p>The young king&rsquo;s</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;addiction was to courses
+vain,<br />
+His companies unletter&rsquo;d, rude, and shallow,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+90</span>precisely like Shakespeare&rsquo;s courses and
+companions at Stratford</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Had never noted in him any
+study.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Stratford tradition, a century after Shakespeare left the
+town, did not remember &ldquo;any study&rdquo; in him; none had
+been &ldquo;noted,&rdquo; nor could have been remembered.&nbsp;
+To return to Henry, he shines in divinity, knowledge of
+&ldquo;commonwealth affairs,&rdquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;You would say, it hath been all in all his
+study.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>He is as intimate with the art of war; to him &ldquo;Gordian
+knots of policy&rdquo; are &ldquo;familiar as his
+garter.&rdquo;&nbsp; He <i>must</i> have</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The art and practic part of
+life,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>as &ldquo;mistress to this theorie,&rdquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Which is a wonder how his Grace should
+glean it,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>as his youth was riotous, and was lived in all men&rsquo;s
+gaze,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;And never noted in him any study,<br />
+Any retirement, any sequestration<br />
+From open haunts and popularity.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The Bishop of Ely can only suggest that Henry&rsquo;s study or
+&ldquo;contemplation&rdquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Grew like the summer grass, fastest by
+night,<br />
+Unseen,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and Canterbury says</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;It must be so, for miracles are
+ceased.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 91</span>And
+thus the miracle of genius baffles the poet, for Henry&rsquo;s
+had been &ldquo;noisy nights,&rdquo; notoriously noisy.</p>
+<p>Now, as we shall later show, Bacon&rsquo;s rapid production of
+the plays, considering his other contemporary activities and
+varied but always absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as
+the sudden blossoming of Henry&rsquo;s knowledge and
+accomplishments; for all Bacon&rsquo;s known exertions and
+occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing interest, were
+remote from the art of tragedy and comedy.&nbsp; If we are to
+admit the marvel of genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits
+we know much, by parity of reasoning we may grant that the actor,
+of whom we know much less, may have had genius: had powers and
+could use opportunities in a way for which Baconians make no
+allowance.</p>
+<p>We now turn to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s chapter,
+&ldquo;Shakespeare and &lsquo;Genius.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; It
+opens with the accustomed list of poor Will&rsquo;s
+disqualifications, &ldquo;a boy born of illiterate
+parents,&rdquo; but we need not rehearse the list. <a
+name="citation91a"></a><a href="#footnote91a"
+class="citation">[91a]</a>&nbsp; He &ldquo;comes to town&rdquo;
+(date unknown) &ldquo;a needy adventurer&rdquo;; in 1593 appeared
+the poem <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, author&rsquo;s name being
+printed as &ldquo;W. Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then comes
+<i>Lucrece</i> (1594).&nbsp; In 1598 <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, printed as &ldquo;corrected and
+augmented&rdquo; by &ldquo;W. Shakespere.&rdquo;&nbsp; And so on
+with all the rest.&nbsp; Criticism of the learning and splendour
+of the two <a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+92</span>poems follows.&nbsp; To <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost</i>, and the amusing things written about it by Baconians, I
+return; and to Shakespeare&rsquo;s &ldquo;impossible&rdquo;
+knowledge of courtly society, his &ldquo;polish and
+urbanity,&rdquo; his familiar acquaintance with contemporary
+French politics, foreign proverbs, and &ldquo;the gossip of the
+Court&rdquo; of Elizabeth: these points are made by His Honour
+Judge Webb.</p>
+<p>All this lore to Shakespeare is
+&ldquo;impossible&rdquo;&mdash;he could not read, say some
+Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none; on these points
+I have said my say.&nbsp; The omniscient Baconians know that all
+the early works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a man
+of, say thirty&mdash;who <i>was</i> no more, and <i>knew</i> no
+more, than they know that the actor was and knew; and as for
+&ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; it cannot work miracles.&nbsp; Genius
+&ldquo;bestows upon no one a knowledge of facts,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only
+what he had learned.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness)
+has a way of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary
+&ldquo;dull intelligent man&rdquo; gains none.&nbsp; Keen
+interest, keen curiosity, swift observation, even the power of
+tearing out the things essential from a book, the gift of rapid
+reading; the faculty of being alive to the
+fingertips,&mdash;these, with a tenacious memory, may enable a
+small boy to know more facts of many sorts than his elders and
+betters and all the neighbours.&nbsp; They are puzzled, if they
+make the <a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+93</span>discovery of his knowledge.&nbsp; Scott was such a small
+boy; whether we think him a man of genius or not.&nbsp;
+Shakspere, even the actor, was, perhaps, a man of genius, and
+possessed this power of rapid acquisition and vivid retention of
+all manner of experience and information.&nbsp; To what I suppose
+to have been his opportunities in London, I shall return.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile, let the doubter take up any popular English books of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s day: he will find them replete with much
+knowledge wholly new to him&mdash;which he will also find in
+Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>A good example is this: Judge Webb proclaimed that in points
+of scientific lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon
+were much on a level.&nbsp; Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper,
+said that the facts staggered him, as a
+&ldquo;Stratfordian.&rdquo;&nbsp; A friend told me that he too
+was equally moved.&nbsp; I replied that these pseudoscientific
+&ldquo;facts&rdquo; had long been commonplaces.&nbsp; Pliny was a
+rich source of them.&nbsp; Professor Dowden took the matter up,
+with full knowledge, <a name="citation93a"></a><a
+href="#footnote93a" class="citation">[93a]</a> and reconverted
+Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote: &ldquo;I am not versed in the literature
+of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians who
+put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the
+coincidences were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and
+the poet.&nbsp; Professor Dowden has proved that this is not
+so.&rdquo; <a name="citation93b"></a><a href="#footnote93b"
+class="citation">[93b]</a></p>
+<p><a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 94</span>Were I
+to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by
+requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers&rsquo;s
+papers on &ldquo;The Mechanism of Genius&rdquo; (in his <i>Human
+Personality</i>), and to consider the humble problem of
+&ldquo;Calculating Boys,&rdquo; which is touched on also by
+Cardinal Newman.&nbsp; How do they, at the age of innocence,
+arrive at their amazing results?&nbsp; How did the child Pascal,
+ignorant of Euclid, work out the Euclidean propositions of
+&ldquo;bars and rounds,&rdquo; as he called lines and
+circles?&nbsp; Science has no solution!</p>
+<p>Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge
+of human nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in
+manners and matter of war) Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc;&mdash;and science,
+I fancy, is much to seek for a reply.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert
+Burns.&nbsp; The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I
+think, turn so much to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s advantage as he
+supposes.&nbsp; The genius of Burns, of course, is far indeed
+below the level of that of the author of the Shakespearean
+plays.&nbsp; But that author and Burns have this in common with
+each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work arises
+from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier
+artists.&nbsp; Burns almost always has a key-note already
+touched, as confessedly in the poems of his predecessor,
+Fergusson; of Hamilton of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or
+artistic, and so forth.&nbsp; <a name="page95"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 95</span>He &ldquo;alchemised&rdquo; his
+materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of his author of the plays;
+turned dross into gold, brick into marble.&nbsp; Notoriously much
+Shakespearean work is of the same nature.</p>
+<p>The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his
+parish school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin
+and Greek; in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some
+English and French; and he knew a modernised version of Blind
+Harry&rsquo;s <i>Wallace</i>; Locke&rsquo;s <i>Essay</i>; <i>The
+Spectator</i>, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots poets of
+his century, with a world of old Scots songs.&nbsp; These things,
+and such as these, were Burns&rsquo;s given literary
+materials.&nbsp; He used them in the only way open to him, in
+poems written for a rural audience, and published for an
+Edinburgh public.&nbsp; No classical, no theatrical materials
+were given; or, if he read the old drama, he could not, in his
+rural conditions, and in a Scotland where the theatre was in a
+very small way, venture on producing plays, for which there was
+no demand, while he had no knowledge of the Stage.&nbsp; Burns
+found and filled the only channels open to him, in a printed
+book, and in music books for which he transmuted old songs.</p>
+<p>The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed
+with reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and
+theatrical; and, from his profession of actor, by far the best
+channel open to him was the theatre.&nbsp; Badly as it paid the
+outside author, there was nothing <a name="page96"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 96</span>that paid better.&nbsp; <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i> brought &ldquo;more praise than pudding,&rdquo; if one
+may venture a guess.&nbsp; With the freedom of the theatre Will
+could soar to all heights and plumb all depths.&nbsp; No such
+opportunity had Burns, even if he could have used it, and, owing
+to a variety of causes, his spirit soon ceased to soar high or
+wing wide.</p>
+<p>I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the
+current Elizabethan light literature&mdash;<i>Euphues</i>,
+Lyly&rsquo;s Court comedies, novels full of the classics and of
+social life; Spenser, Sidney&mdash;his <i>Defence of Poesy</i>,
+and <i>Arcadia</i> (1590)&mdash;with scores of tales translated
+from the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign
+society, and discourses of knights and ladies.&nbsp; He saw the
+plays of the day, perhaps as one of &ldquo;the
+groundlings.&rdquo;&nbsp; He often beheld Society, from without,
+when acting before the Queen and at great houses.&nbsp; He had
+thus, if I am right, sufficient examples of style and manner, and
+knowledge of how the great were supposed (in books) to comport
+and conduct themselves.&nbsp; The books were cheap, and could be
+borrowed, and turned over at the booksellers&rsquo; stalls. <a
+name="citation96a"></a><a href="#footnote96a"
+class="citation">[96a]</a>&nbsp; The Elizabethan style was
+omnipresent.&nbsp; Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a
+lover of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily
+influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that
+my conjectures are not too audacious.&nbsp; Not only &ldquo;the
+man in <a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 97</span>the
+street,&rdquo; but &ldquo;the reading public&rdquo; (so loved by
+Coleridge), have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in
+which a quick man reads.&nbsp; Watch them poring for hours over a
+newspaper!&nbsp; Let me quote what Sir Walter Raleigh says: <a
+name="citation97a"></a><a href="#footnote97a"
+class="citation">[97a]</a> &ldquo;Shakespeare was one of those
+swift and masterly readers who know what they want of a book;
+they scorn nothing that is dressed in print, but turn over the
+pages with a quick discernment of all that brings them new
+information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles their
+fancy.&nbsp; Such a reader will have done with a volume in a few
+minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years.&nbsp;
+He is a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a
+learned man.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as
+was Dr. Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to
+genius.&nbsp; The accomplishment is only a marvel to&mdash;well,
+I need not be particular about the kind of person to whom it is a
+marvel!</p>
+<p>Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an
+eloquent passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and
+of Will, quoted by Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation97b"></a><a
+href="#footnote97b" class="citation">[97b]</a> from Mr. Morgan.
+<a name="citation97c"></a><a href="#footnote97c"
+class="citation">[97c]</a></p>
+<p>Genius, says Mr. Morgan, &ldquo;did not guide Burns&rsquo;s
+untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and
+Cyprus.&rdquo;&nbsp; No! that was not <a name="page98"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 98</span>Burns&rsquo;s lay; nor would he have
+found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews
+professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote <i>The Epigoniad</i>, and sang
+of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his
+friend.&nbsp; The public of 1780&ndash;90 did not want new epics
+of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible
+to Burns full of the medi&aelig;val legends of Troy and
+Athens.&nbsp; But the popular literature accessible to Will was
+full of the <i>medi&aelig;val</i> legends of Thebes, Troy, and
+Athens; and of these, <i>not</i> of Homer, Will made his
+market.&nbsp; Egypt he knew only in the new English version of
+Plutarch&rsquo;s <i>Lives</i>; of Homer, he (or the author of
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>) used only Iliad VII., in
+Chapman&rsquo;s new translation (1598).&nbsp; For the rest he had
+Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton&rsquo;s <i>Destruction
+of Troy</i>, still reprinted as a <i>popular</i> book as late as
+1713.&nbsp; Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, &ldquo;reproduce
+the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born
+and buried and passed into history a thousand years before he had
+been begotten. . . &rdquo;&nbsp; He bestowed the manners of
+medi&aelig;val chivalrous romance on his Trojans and
+Greeks.&nbsp; He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a
+Duke.&nbsp; He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too
+early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.&nbsp; Look at his
+notion of &ldquo;the very manners&rdquo; of early post-Roman
+Britain in <i>Cymbeline</i> and <i>King Lear</i>!&nbsp;
+Concerning &ldquo;the anomalous status of a King of Scotland
+under one of <a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+99</span>its primitive Kings&rdquo; the author of <i>Macbeth</i>
+knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth
+concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man
+slain in a blacksmith&rsquo;s bothy), and of the whole affair,
+the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated
+legends.&nbsp; The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr.
+Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of &ldquo;matters of
+curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig
+out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for
+historians to treat of or schools to teach!&rdquo;</p>
+<p><i>Mon Dieu</i>! do historians <i>not</i> treat of
+&ldquo;matters of curious research&rdquo; and of statutes and of
+treaties?&nbsp; As for &ldquo;old romances,&rdquo; they were
+current and popular.&nbsp; The &ldquo;occult&rdquo; sources of
+<i>King Lear</i> are a popular tale attached to legendary
+&ldquo;history&rdquo; and a story in Sidney&rsquo;s
+<i>Arcadia</i>.&nbsp; Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as &ldquo;a
+letterless peasant lad,&rdquo; or the Author, whoever he was, is
+not &ldquo;invested with all the love&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>,
+<i>v.1.</i> &ldquo;lore&rdquo;), &ldquo;which the ages behind him
+had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Our friend&rsquo;s style has flowery components,&rdquo;
+Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his
+American author, &ldquo;and yet Shakespeare who did all
+this,&rdquo; <i>et c&aelig;tera</i>.&nbsp; But Shakespeare did
+<i>not</i> do &ldquo;all this&rdquo;!&nbsp; We know the sources
+of the plays well enough: novels in one of which
+&ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo;
+Holinshed, with his contaminated <a name="page100"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 100</span>legends; North&rsquo;s
+<i>Plutarch</i>, done out of the French; older plays, and the
+rest of it.&nbsp; Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the
+<i>Hennskringla</i> for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which
+is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the
+State Papers.&nbsp; Shakespeare did not, like William of
+Deloraine, dig up &ldquo;clasped books, buried and
+forgotten.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no original research; the author
+uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of
+uncritical history which were current in his day.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot
+what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence.&nbsp; And
+the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.</p>
+<p>But Mr. Greenwood asks &ldquo;what was the poetic
+output?&rdquo; in Burns&rsquo;s case. <a
+name="citation100a"></a><a href="#footnote100a"
+class="citation">[100a]</a>&nbsp; It was what we know, and
+<i>that</i> was what suited his age and his circumstances.&nbsp;
+It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to
+the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter in
+Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of
+literature.</p>
+<p>Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I
+have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan
+theatre.&nbsp; I have tried to show how easily his mind might be
+steeped in the all-pervading classicism and foreign romance of
+the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the
+commonly known fragments <a name="page101"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 101</span>from the great banquet of the
+classics,&mdash;with such history, wholly uncritical, as
+Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could
+copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of
+romances and Court plays; and in the current popular <i>Morte
+d&rsquo;Arthur</i> and <i>Destruction of Troy</i>.</p>
+<p>I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that
+&ldquo;Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become
+an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral
+qualities with which it is associated, and the opportunities that
+are open to it&mdash;in a word, on the circumstances of its
+environment.&rdquo; <a name="citation101a"></a><a
+href="#footnote101a" class="citation">[101a]</a></p>
+<p>Of course by &ldquo;moral qualities,&rdquo; a character
+without spot or stain is not intended: we may take that for
+granted.&nbsp; Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of
+Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance
+with the opportunities open to it, and with &ldquo;the
+circumstances of its environment.&rdquo;&nbsp; Without the
+&ldquo;environment,&rdquo; no Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc,&mdash;without
+the environment, no Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of
+&ldquo;the light people,&rdquo; the crowd of wits living from
+hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed
+that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the
+poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine,
+the wild talk, the wit, the <a name="page102"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 102</span>travellers&rsquo; tales, the
+seamen&rsquo;s company, the vision of the Court, the gallants,
+the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak
+in the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly
+was.&nbsp; Not as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple
+literary man, William does not like, though he thoroughly
+understands, the mob.&nbsp; Like Alceste (in <i>Le
+Misanthrope</i> of Poquelin), he might say,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>L&rsquo;Ami du genre humain n&rsquo;est
+point du tout mon fait</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his
+mob.&nbsp; This reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting,
+or the study-haunting, or law-court, and chamber of criminal
+examination-rooms haunting Bacon make acquaintance with Mrs.
+Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers, and carters, and
+Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s crowd of people hanging loose on the
+town?</p>
+<p>It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone
+and manners of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely
+poetic and conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his
+immense knowledge of what is called &ldquo;low life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If you reply, as regards Bacon, &ldquo;his genius divined the
+Costards and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and
+drawers, and Bardolphs, and carters, from a hint or two, a
+glance,&rdquo; I answer that Will had much better sources for
+<i>them</i> in his own experience of life, and had conventional
+<a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>poetic
+sources for his courtiers&mdash;of whom, in the quick, he saw
+quite as much as Moli&egrave;re did of his <i>Marquis</i>.</p>
+<p>But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of
+accounting for Bacon&rsquo;s pictures of rude rustic life, and he
+is backed by Lord Penzance, that aged Judge.&nbsp; The way is
+short.&nbsp; These pictures of rural life and character were
+interpolated into the plays of Bacon by his collaborator, William
+Shakspere, actor, &ldquo;who prepared the plays for the
+stage.&rdquo;&nbsp; This brilliant suggestion is borrowed from
+Mr. Appleton Morgan. <a name="citation103a"></a><a
+href="#footnote103a" class="citation">[103a]</a></p>
+<p>Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it <i>is</i>
+difficult to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain
+worlds and aspects of character which he could scarcely draw
+&ldquo;from the life.&rdquo;&nbsp; I am willing to ascribe
+miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the
+honour to the actor, &ldquo;who prepared the plays for the
+stage.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe
+as I believe in &ldquo;Genius.&rdquo;&nbsp; Shakespeare and
+Moli&egrave;re did not live in &ldquo;Society,&rdquo; though both
+rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over the invisible
+barrier between the actor and the great people in whose houses or
+palaces he takes the part of Entertainer.&nbsp; The rest they
+divined, by genius.</p>
+<p>Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of <a
+name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>carters,
+drawers, Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and
+their boys; not at Court, not in the study, did he meet
+them.&nbsp; How then did he create his multitude of very
+low-lived persons?&nbsp; Rustics and rural constables he
+<i>may</i> have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his
+collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer
+company.&nbsp; So you have to admit
+&ldquo;Genius,&rdquo;&mdash;the miracle of &ldquo;Genius&rdquo;
+in your Bacon,&mdash;to an even greater extent than I need it in
+the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that
+Will collaborated with Bacon.</p>
+<p>Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with
+a very different genius, education, and environment.&nbsp; Burns
+could easily get at the Press, and be published: that was
+impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any
+lyrics.&nbsp; Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a
+humorist.&nbsp; Tradition at Stratford says something about the
+humorist, and tradition, <i>in similar circumstances</i>, would
+have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy
+years.</p>
+<p>Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I
+am obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving
+school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and
+man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley
+and Quiney.&nbsp; Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married
+at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns
+did,&mdash;some outlying <a name="page105"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 105</span>deer he could not so readily shoot
+at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer,
+and was in troubles many.&nbsp; Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye
+for the main chance.&nbsp; Everything was going to ruin with his
+father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow
+tradition), was not satisfactory.&nbsp; His opinion of dominies,
+if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently
+expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.</p>
+<p>Something must be done!&nbsp; Perhaps the straitest Baconian
+will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or
+even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been
+attracted.&nbsp; He was a practical man, and he made for London,
+and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the
+theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small
+brigade of boys as his deputies.&nbsp; According to Ben Jonson he
+shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic
+accent, that terrible bar!&nbsp; The actors find that out; he is
+admitted within the house as a &ldquo;servitor&rdquo;&mdash;a
+call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.</p>
+<p>By 1592, when Greene wrote his <i>Groatsworth</i>,
+&ldquo;Shakescene&rdquo; thinks he can bombast out a blank verse
+with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a
+furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a
+rival to be dreaded by Greene&rsquo;s three author friends:
+whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights;
+<a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>the
+critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of
+them.</p>
+<p>Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now
+had, say, five years of such opportunities as were open to a man
+connected with the stage.&nbsp; Among these, in that age, we may,
+perhaps, reckon a good deal of very mixed society&mdash;writing
+men, bookish young blades, young blades who haunt the theatre,
+and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the gallants.</p>
+<p>What follows?&nbsp; Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a
+supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good
+company.&nbsp; This is quite natural; the most modish young
+gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any
+amusing company.&nbsp; They found it among prize-fighters, when
+Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact that he was
+a lord.&nbsp; Moreover there were no women on the stage to
+distract the attention of the gallants.&nbsp; The players, says
+Asinius Lupus, in Jonson&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>, &ldquo;corrupt
+young gentry very much, I know it.&rdquo;&nbsp; I take the
+quotation from Mr. Greenwood. <a name="citation106a"></a><a
+href="#footnote106a" class="citation">[106a]</a>&nbsp; They could
+not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate
+with them.&nbsp; From Ben&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>, which
+bristles with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also quotes a
+railing address by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor,
+&ldquo;There are some of you players honest, gentlemanlike
+scoundrels, and suspected to ha&rsquo; some wit, as <a
+name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 107</span>well as
+your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests; <i>and are
+companions for gallants</i>.&nbsp; A man may skelder ye, now and
+then, of half a dozen shillings or so.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation107a"></a><a href="#footnote107a"
+class="citation">[107a]</a>&nbsp; We think of Nigel Olifaunt in
+<i>The Fortunes of Nigel</i>; but better gallants might choose to
+have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>To suppose that young men of position would not form a
+playhouse acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor
+seems to me to show misunderstanding of human nature.&nbsp; The
+players were, when unprotected by men of rank,
+&ldquo;vagabonds.&rdquo;&nbsp; The citizens of London, mainly
+Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not
+Puritans.&nbsp; The Court patronised the actors who performed
+Masques in palaces and great houses.&nbsp; The wealth and
+splendid attire of the actors, their acquisition of land and of
+coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights.&nbsp; Envy of
+the actors appears in the Cambridge &ldquo;Parnassus&rdquo; plays
+of <i>c.</i> 1600&ndash;2.&nbsp; In the mouth of Will Kempe, who
+acted Dogberry in Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, and was in favour,
+says Heywood, with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put
+this brag: &ldquo;For Londoners, who of more report than Dick
+Burbage and Will Kempe?&nbsp; He is not counted a gentleman that
+knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is not my
+opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be, as much
+&ldquo;in Society&rdquo; as is possible for a mere literary
+man.&nbsp; I do not, in fancy, see <a name="page108"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 108</span>him wooing a Maid of Honour.&nbsp;
+He was a man&rsquo;s man, a peer might be interested in him as
+easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician,
+<i>que s&ccedil;ais-je</i>?&nbsp; Southampton, discovering his
+qualities, may have been more interested, interested in a better
+way.</p>
+<p>In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with
+human nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the
+young, handsome, popular Earl of Southampton; who found him
+interesting, and interested himself in the poet.&nbsp; There
+followed the dedication to the Earl of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>; a
+poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating
+to an Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to
+dedicate.&nbsp; The mere fact that the dedication was accepted,
+and followed by that of <i>Lucrece</i>, proves that the Earl did
+not share the surprise of Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; He, conceivably,
+will argue that the Earl knew the real concealed author, and the
+secret of the pseudonym.&nbsp; But of the hypothesis of such a
+choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said.&nbsp; Whatever
+happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable to be
+dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we are
+to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have
+left any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the
+poet.</p>
+<p>This appears to me to be the natural way of <a
+name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 109</span>looking at
+the affair.&nbsp; But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or
+&ldquo;patronage&rdquo; of Southampton &ldquo;not a scrap of
+evidence exists.&rdquo; <a name="citation109a"></a><a
+href="#footnote109a" class="citation">[109a]</a>&nbsp; Where
+would Mr. Greenwood expect to find a scrap of evidence?&nbsp; In
+literary anecdote?&nbsp; Of contemporary literary anecdote about
+Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and
+Fletcher, there is none, or next to none.&nbsp; There is the
+tradition that Southampton gave the poet &pound;1000 towards a
+purchase to which he had a mind.&nbsp; (Rowe seems to have got
+this from Davenant,&mdash;through Betterton.)&nbsp; In what
+documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of
+evidence?&nbsp; Perhaps in Southampton&rsquo;s book of his
+expenditure, and that does not exist.&nbsp; It is in the accounts
+of Prince Charlie that I find him, poor as he was, giving money
+to Jean Jacques Rousseau.</p>
+<p>As to the chances of an actor&rsquo;s knowing &ldquo;smart
+people,&rdquo; Heywood, who knew all that world, tells us <a
+name="citation109b"></a><a href="#footnote109b"
+class="citation">[109b]</a> that &ldquo;Tarleton, in his time,
+was gracious with the Queen, his sovereign,&rdquo; Queen
+Elizabeth.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will Kempe was in the favour of his
+sovereign.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><i>They</i> had advantages, they were not literary men, but
+low comedians.&nbsp; I am not pretending that, though his</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;flights upon the banks of
+Thames<br />
+So did take Eliza and our James,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Will Shakspere &ldquo;was gracious with the Queen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>We
+may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players
+address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.&nbsp; They have the
+audacity to say nothing about having asked and received
+permission to dedicate.&nbsp; They say that the Earls &ldquo;have
+prosecuted both the plays and their authour living&rdquo; (while
+in life) &ldquo;with much favour.&rdquo;&nbsp; They &ldquo;have
+collected and published the works of &lsquo;the dead&rsquo; . . .
+only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and
+Fellow&rdquo; (associate) &ldquo;as was our Shakespeare,
+&lsquo;your servant Shakespeare.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the
+actor&rsquo;s authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in
+which the two Earls held him.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a
+name="citation110a"></a><a href="#footnote110a"
+class="citation">[110a]</a> supposes that Jonson wrote the
+Preface, which contains an allusion to a well-known ode of
+Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny.&nbsp; Be that as it may, the
+Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke and
+Montgomery.&nbsp; To <i>them</i> it cannot lie; <i>they</i> know
+whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed,
+or not, that the plays were their
+&ldquo;servant&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; How is Mr. Greenwood to
+overcome this certain testimony of the Actors, to the identity of
+their late &ldquo;Fellow&rdquo; the player, with the author; and
+to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and his
+compositions?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may
+reasonably suppose <a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+111</span>Ben to have written the dedication which the players
+signed. <a name="citation111a"></a><a href="#footnote111a"
+class="citation">[111a]</a></p>
+<p>Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of
+Shakespeare, the dedication does not say in so many words.&nbsp;
+They had seen his plays and had &ldquo;favoured&rdquo; both him
+and them, with so much favour, had &ldquo;used indulgence&rdquo;
+to the author.&nbsp; That is not nearly explicit enough for the
+precise Baconians.&nbsp; But the Earls knew whether what was said
+were true or false.&nbsp; I am not sure whether the Baconians
+regard them as having been duped as to the authorship, or as
+fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian joke and
+mystery&mdash;that &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; the author
+is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name
+written in legal documents as &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William
+Shakspere was acting in a company (1592&ndash;3), Bacon, or who
+you please, wrote <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, and, signing &ldquo;W.
+Shakspeare,&rdquo; dedicated it to his young friend, the Earl,
+promising to add &ldquo;some graver labour,&rdquo; a promise
+fulfilled in <i>Lucrece</i>.&nbsp; In 1593, Bacon was chiefly
+occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful
+Earl&mdash;the Earl of Essex, not of Southampton: to Essex he did
+not dedicate his two poems (if <i>Venus</i> and <i>Lucrece</i>
+were his).&nbsp; He &ldquo;did nothing but ruminate&rdquo; (he
+tells the world) on Essex.&nbsp; How Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+Unknown was <a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+112</span>occupied in 1593&ndash;4, of course we cannot possibly
+be aware.</p>
+<p>I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as
+much schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of
+life in London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius,
+might, by 1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as
+&ldquo;Shakescene.&rdquo;&nbsp; There remains a difficulty.&nbsp;
+By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of <i>thirteen</i> plays,
+or even of six.&nbsp; But I have not credited him with the
+authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely,
+<i>Hamlet</i>, <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, <i>Midsummer
+Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, <i>Comedy of
+Errors</i>, <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, <i>King
+John</i>, the three plays of <i>Henry VI</i>, and <i>The Taming
+of the Shrew</i>.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a
+name="citation112a"></a><a href="#footnote112a"
+class="citation">[112a]</a> cites Judge Webb for the fact that
+between the end of 1587 and the end of 1592 &ldquo;some
+half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,&rdquo; and for
+Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s opinion that eleven had been composed.</p>
+<p>If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean
+plays, as we have them, had been written or composed, between
+1587 and 1592, I should be obliged to say that, in my opinion,
+they were not composed, in these five years, by Will.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood writes, &ldquo;Some of the dates are disputable&rdquo;;
+and, for himself, would omit &ldquo;<i>Titus Andronicus</i>, the
+three plays of <i>Henry VI</i>, and possibly also <i>The Taming
+of the Shrew</i>, while <a name="page113"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 113</span>the reference to <i>Hamlet</i> also
+is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very doubtful force.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation113a"></a><a href="#footnote113a"
+class="citation">[113a]</a>&nbsp; This leaves us with six of Dr.
+Furnivall&rsquo;s list of earliest plays put out of action.&nbsp;
+The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous enough to stagger
+my credulity remain.</p>
+<p>I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before
+1592&ndash;3 was the ex-butcher&rsquo;s boy.&nbsp; Meanwhile
+these five plays, written by somebody before 1593, meet the
+reader on the threshold of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s book <a
+name="citation113b"></a><a href="#footnote113b"
+class="citation">[113b]</a> with Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s eleven;
+and they fairly frighten him, if he be a
+&ldquo;Stratfordian.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Will, even Will,&rdquo;
+says the Stratfordian, &ldquo;could not have composed the five,
+much less the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed&rsquo;s thirteen
+&lsquo;before 1592.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation113c"></a><a
+href="#footnote113c" class="citation">[113c]</a>&nbsp; But, at
+the close of his work <a name="citation113d"></a><a
+href="#footnote113d" class="citation">[113d]</a> Mr. Greenwood
+reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean
+plays &ldquo;before 1592&rdquo; as mustered by Mr. Reed, a
+Baconian of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of <i>feu</i>
+Mr. Bludyer of <i>The Tomahawk</i>.</p>
+<p>From the five plays left to Shakespeare&rsquo;s account in p.
+51, <i>King John</i> (as we know it) is now eliminated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I find it impossible to believe that the same man was the
+author of the drama&rdquo; (<i>The Troublesome Reign of King
+John</i>) &ldquo;published <a name="page114"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 114</span>in 1591, and that which, so far as
+we know, first saw the light in the Folio of 1623 . . .&nbsp;
+Hardly a single line of the original version reappears in the
+<i>King John</i> of Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation114a"></a><a href="#footnote114a"
+class="citation">[114a]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;I think it is a mistake
+to endeavour to fortify the argument against him&rdquo; (my Will,
+<i>toi que j&rsquo;aime</i>), &ldquo;by ascribing to Shakespeare
+such old plays as the <i>King John</i> of 1591 or the primitive
+<i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo; <a name="citation114b"></a><a
+href="#footnote114b" class="citation">[114b]</a></p>
+<p>I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw <i>King John</i>
+apparently still &ldquo;coloured on the card&rdquo; among
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s lot.&rdquo;&nbsp; We are now left with
+<i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, <i>Midsummer
+Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, <i>Comedy of Errors</i>, and <i>Romeo
+and Juliet</i>, out of Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s list of plays up to
+1593.&nbsp; The phantom force of miraculously early plays is
+&ldquo;following darkness like a dream.&rdquo;&nbsp; We do not
+know the date of <i>A Midsummer Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, we do
+not know the date of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.&nbsp; Mr. Gollancz
+dates the former &ldquo;about 1592,&rdquo; and the latter
+&ldquo;at 1591.&rdquo; <a name="citation114c"></a><a
+href="#footnote114c" class="citation">[114c]</a>&nbsp; This is a
+mere personal speculation.&nbsp; Of <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, we only know that our version is one
+&ldquo;corrected and augmented&rdquo; by William Shakespeare in
+1598.&nbsp; I dare say it is as early as 1591&ndash;2, in its
+older form.&nbsp; Of <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>, Mr. Collins
+wrote, &ldquo;It is all but certain that it was written between
+1589 and 1592, and it is quite certain that it was written before
+the end of 1594.&rdquo; <a name="citation114d"></a><a
+href="#footnote114d" class="citation">[114d]</a></p>
+<p>The legion of Shakespearean plays of date <a
+name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 115</span>before 1593
+has vanished.&nbsp; The miracle is very considerably
+abated.&nbsp; In place of introducing the airy hosts of plays
+before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps, more
+instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate,
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist
+may be placed about 1591&ndash;3.&nbsp; There would then have
+been no specious appearance of miracles to be credited by
+Stratfordians to Will.&nbsp; But even so, we have sufficient to
+&ldquo;give us pause,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, with
+justice.&nbsp; It gives <i>me</i> &ldquo;pause,&rdquo; if I am to
+believe that, between 1587 and 1592, Will wrote <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>, <i>A
+Midsummer Night&rsquo;s Dream</i>, and <i>Romeo and
+Juliet</i>.&nbsp; There is a limit even to my gullibility, and if
+anyone wrote all these plays, as we now possess them, before
+1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man.&nbsp; But the
+dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.</p>
+<h2><a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+119</span>VI<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE COURTLY PLAYS: &ldquo;LOVE&rsquo;S
+LABOUR&rsquo;S LOST&rdquo;</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> now come to consider another
+&ldquo;miracle&rdquo; discovered in the plays,&mdash;a miracle if
+the actor be the author.&nbsp; The new portent is the courtliness
+and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the
+coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen
+and ladies in the plays.&nbsp; To be sure the refinement in the
+jests is often conspicuously absent.&nbsp; How could the rude
+actor learn his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched
+conceits?&nbsp; This question I have tried to answer
+already,&mdash;the whole of these fashions abound in the
+literature of the day.</p>
+<p>Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not
+make the ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do
+converse, whether in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier
+style, unless he himself frequented their society.&nbsp; Marlowe
+did not frequent the best society; <i>he</i> was no courtier, but
+there is the high courtly style in the speeches of the great and
+noble in <i>Edward II</i>.&nbsp; Courtiers and kings never did
+speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in blank
+verse.&nbsp; The style is a poetical convention, while the quips
+and conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot <a
+name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 120</span>through the
+literature of the age of Lyly and his <i>Euphues</i> and his
+comedies, the age of the <i>Arcadia</i>.</p>
+<p>A cheap and probable source of Will&rsquo;s courtliness is to
+be found in the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were
+separately printed between 1584 and 1592.&nbsp; Lyly&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;real significance is that he was the first to bring
+together on the English stage the elements of high comedy,
+thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare&rsquo;s <i>Much Ado
+about Nothing</i> and <i>As You Like It</i>&rdquo; (and
+<i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, one may add).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly
+miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly&rsquo;s
+plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny&rsquo;s <i>Natural
+History</i>. . . .&nbsp; One could hardly imagine <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> as existent in the period from 1590 to
+1600, had not Lyly&rsquo;s work just preceded it.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation120a"></a><a href="#footnote120a"
+class="citation">[120a]</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is to Lyly&rsquo;s plays,&rdquo; writes Dr.
+Landmann, &ldquo;that Shakespeare owes so much in the liveliness
+of his dialogues, in smartness of expression, and especially in
+that predilection for witticisms, quibbles, and playing upon
+words which he shows in his comedies as well as in his
+tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp; There follows a dissertation on the
+affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the
+<i>Pl&eacute;iade</i> in France, and generally of the artificial
+manner in Europe, till in England we reach Lyly, &ldquo;in whose
+comedies,&rdquo; <a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+121</span>says Dr. Furness, &ldquo;I think we should look for
+motives which appeared later in Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation121a"></a><a href="#footnote121a"
+class="citation">[121a]</a></p>
+<p>The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from
+books and court plays his knowledge of fashions far more
+prevalent in literature than at Court, decide that the poet of
+<i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> was not Will, but the
+courtly &ldquo;concealed poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; No doubt Baconians
+may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald <a name="citation121b"></a><a
+href="#footnote121b" class="citation">[121b]</a> that
+&ldquo;Bacon wrote Marlowe,&rdquo; and, by parity of reasoning
+many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly,
+pouring into Lyly&rsquo;s comedies the grace and wit, the quips
+and conceits of his own courtly youth.&nbsp; &ldquo;What for
+no?&rdquo;&nbsp; The hypothesis is as good as the other
+hypotheses, &ldquo;Bacon wrote Marlowe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Bacon wrote
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to
+ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to all the
+world, and are noted even in short educational histories of
+English literature.&nbsp; Shakespeare, in London, had only to
+look at the books on the stalls, to read or, if he had the
+chance, to see Lyly&rsquo;s plays, and read the poems of the
+time.&nbsp; I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet.&nbsp;
+It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to
+catch the manner of Lyly&rsquo;s Court comedies, and
+&ldquo;Marlowe&rsquo;s mighty line&rdquo; (Marlowe was not <a
+name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+122</span>&ldquo;brought up on the knees of
+Marchionesses&rdquo;!), but to improve on them.&nbsp; People did
+not commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did
+not write in the poetic convention.&nbsp; Certainly Queen Mary
+and Queen Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule (we have
+abundance of their letters), like women of this world.&nbsp;
+There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters
+from Mary to Bothwell.&nbsp; In this (we have a copy of the
+original French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured
+style already practised by <i>Les Pr&eacute;cieuses</i> of her
+day; and expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon.&nbsp; If
+courtiers of both sexes conversed in the style of <i>Euphues</i>
+(which is improbable), they learned the trick of it from
+<i>Euphues</i>; not the author of <i>Euphues</i> from them.&nbsp;
+Lyly&rsquo;s most popular prose was accessible to
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; The whole convention as to how the great
+should speak and bear themselves was accessible in poetry and the
+drama.&nbsp; A man of genius naturally made his ladies and
+courtiers more witty, more &ldquo;conceited,&rdquo; more
+eloquent, more gracious than any human beings ever were anywhere,
+in daily life.</p>
+<p>It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge
+facts so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon,
+intimately familiar with the society of the great, could make the
+great speak as, in the plays, they do&mdash;and as in real life
+they probably did <i>not</i>!</p>
+<p>We now look at <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>,
+published <a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+123</span>in quarto, in 1598, as &ldquo;corrected and augmented
+by W. Shakespere.&rdquo;&nbsp; The date of composition is
+unknown, but the many varieties of versification, with some
+allusions, mark it as among the earliest of the dramas.&nbsp;
+Supposing that Shakespeare obtained his knowledge of fine manners
+and speech, and of the tedious quips and conceits which he
+satirises, from the contemporary poems, plays, and novels which
+abounded in them, and from <i>pr&eacute;cieux</i> and
+<i>pr&eacute;cieuses</i> who imitated them, as I suggest, even
+then <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> is an extremely
+eccentric piece.&nbsp; I cannot imagine how a man who knew the
+foreign politics of his age as Bacon did, could have dreamed of
+writing anything so eccentric, that is, if it has any connection
+with foreign politics of the time.</p>
+<p>The scene is the Court of <i>Ferdinand</i>, King of
+Navarre.&nbsp; In 1589&ndash;93, the eyes of England were fixed
+on the Court of her ally, <i>Henri</i> of Navarre, in his
+struggle with the League and the Guises; the War of
+Religion.&nbsp; But the poet calls the King
+&ldquo;Ferdinand,&rdquo; taking perhaps from some story this
+non-existent son of Charles III of Navarre (died 1425): to whom,
+according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian chronicler of that time,
+the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold.&nbsp; This is a
+transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the
+presence of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of
+Navarre in the play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and
+has <a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 124</span>the
+air of being borrowed from some lost story or brief novel.&nbsp;
+Bacon&rsquo;s brother, Anthony, was English minister at the Court
+of Navarre.&nbsp; What could tempt Bacon to pick out a
+non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre, plant him in the
+distant days of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc, and make him, at that period,
+found an Academe for three years of austere study and absence of
+women?&nbsp; But, if Bacon did this, what could induce him to
+give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the
+Mar&eacute;chal de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in
+1589&ndash;93, the chief adherents of Henri of Navarre), and add
+to them &ldquo;Dumain,&rdquo; that is, the Duc de Mayenne, one of
+the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and of the Huguenots?&nbsp;
+Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare, the freak is of
+the most eccentric,&mdash;but in Bacon this friskiness is indeed
+strange.&nbsp; I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, <a
+name="citation124a"></a><a href="#footnote124a"
+class="citation">[124a]</a> find any &ldquo;allusions to the
+Civil War of France.&rdquo;&nbsp; France and Navarre, in the
+play, are in full peace.</p>
+<p>The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been
+about 1430.&nbsp; By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc
+de Mayenne, and Bankes&rsquo;s celebrated educated horse, the
+author shifts the date to 1591.&nbsp; But the Navarre of the play
+is a region &ldquo;out of space, out of time,&rdquo; a fairy
+world of projected Academes (like that of the four young men in
+de la Primaudaye&rsquo;s <i>L&rsquo;Acad&eacute;mie
+Fran&ccedil;aise</i>, Englished in 1586) and of <a
+name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 125</span>peace,
+while the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was engaged in a
+struggle for life and faith; and in his ceaseless amours.</p>
+<p>Many of Shakespeare&rsquo;s anachronisms are easily
+intelligible.&nbsp; He takes a novel or story about any remote
+period, or he chooses, as for the <i>Midsummer Night&rsquo;s
+Dream</i>, a period earlier than that of the Trojan war.&nbsp; He
+gives to the Athens contemporary with the &ldquo;Late Minoan
+III&rdquo; period (1600 <span class="GutSmall">B.C.</span>?) a
+Duke, and his personages live like English nobles and rustics of
+his own day, among the fairies of English folk-lore.&nbsp; It is
+the manner of Chaucer and of the poets and painters of any age
+before the end of the eighteenth century.&nbsp; The resulting
+anachronisms are natural and intelligible.&nbsp; We do not expect
+war-chariots in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>; it is when the
+author makes the bronze-clad Ach&aelig;ans familiar with Plato
+and Aristotle that we are surprised.&nbsp; In <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> we do not expect the author to introduce
+the manners of the early fifteenth century, the date of the
+affair of the 200,000 ducats.&nbsp; Let the play reflect the men
+and manners of 1589&ndash;93,&mdash;but why place Mayenne, a
+fanatical Catholic foe of Navarre, among the courtiers of the
+Huguenot King of Navarre?</p>
+<p>As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day
+Dumain) appearing as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri,
+Bacon, of all men, could not have made that absurd error.&nbsp;
+It was Shakespeare who took but an absent-minded <a
+name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 126</span>interest in
+foreign politics.&nbsp; If Bacon is building his play on an
+affair, the ducats, of 1425&ndash;35 (roughly speaking), he
+should not bring in a performing horse, trained by Bankes, a
+Staffordshire man, which was performing its tricks at
+Shrewsbury&mdash;in 1591. <a name="citation126a"></a><a
+href="#footnote126a" class="citation">[126a]</a>&nbsp; Thus early
+we find that great scholar mixing up chronology in a way which,
+in Shakespeare even, surprises; but, in Bacon, seems quite out of
+keeping.</p>
+<p>Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as
+&ldquo;Dumain,&rdquo;&mdash;Mayenne, &ldquo;whose name was so
+frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in
+connection with Navarre&rsquo;s movements that Shakespeare was
+led to number him also among his supporters.&rdquo;&nbsp; Bacon
+would not have been so led!&nbsp; As Mayenne and Henri fought
+against each other at Ivry, in 1590, this was carrying nonsense
+far, even for Will, but for the earnestly instructive Bacon!</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The habits of the author could not have been more
+scholastic,&rdquo; so Judge Webb is quoted, &ldquo;if he had,
+like Bacon, spent three years in the University of Cambridge . .
+. &rdquo;&nbsp; Bacon, or whoever corrected the play in 1598,
+might have corrected &ldquo;primater&rdquo; into &ldquo;pia
+mater,&rdquo; unless Bacon intended the blunder for a malapropism
+of &ldquo;Nathaniel, a Curate.&rdquo;&nbsp; Either Will or Bacon,
+either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common Italian
+proverb on Venice into gibberish.&nbsp; It was familiar in
+Florio&rsquo;s <i>Second </i><a name="page127"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 127</span><i>Frutes</i> (1591), and <i>First
+Frutes</i> (1578), with the English translation.&nbsp; The books
+were as accessible to Shakspere as to Bacon.&nbsp; Either author
+might also draw from James Sandford&rsquo;s <i>Garden of
+Pleasure</i>, done out of the Italian in 1573&ndash;6.</p>
+<p>Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be
+discovered in this play, I know not, unless it be in
+Biron&rsquo;s witty speech against study.&nbsp; If the wit
+implies in the author a Cambridge education, Costard and Dull and
+Holofernes imply familiarity with rustics and country
+schoolmasters.&nbsp; Where the author proves that he &ldquo;could
+not have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon,
+he had spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to
+France,&rdquo; I cannot conjecture.&nbsp; <i>There are no French
+politics in the piece</i>, any more than there are
+&ldquo;mysteries of fashionable life,&rdquo; such as Bacon might
+have heard of from Essex and Southampton.&nbsp; There is no
+&ldquo;familiarity with all the gossip of the Court&rdquo;; there
+is no greater knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got
+from common English books.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One does not understand how
+or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age) made all these
+discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood. <a
+name="citation127a"></a><a href="#footnote127a"
+class="citation">[127a]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;Like Bacon, the author
+of the play must have had a large <a name="page128"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 128</span>command of books; he must have had
+his &ldquo;Horace,&rdquo; his &ldquo;Ovidius Naso,&rdquo; and his
+&ldquo;good old &lsquo;Mantuan.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; What a
+prodigious &ldquo;command of books&rdquo;!&nbsp; Country
+schoolmasters confessedly had these books on the school
+desks.&nbsp; It was not even necessary for the author to
+&ldquo;have access to the <i>Chronicles</i> of
+Monstrelet.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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 <i>conte</i>,
+partly based on a passage in Monstrelet.</p>
+<p>Perhaps it will be conceded that <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i> is not a play which can easily be
+attributed to Bacon.&nbsp; We do not know how much of the play
+existed before Shakespeare &ldquo;augmented&rdquo; it in
+1598.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Moli&egrave;re certainly
+corrected and augmented and transfigured, in his illustrious
+career in Paris, several of the brief early sketches which he had
+written when he was the chief of a strolling <i>troupe</i> in
+Southern France.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood does not attribute the wit (such as it is), the
+quips, the conceits, the affectations satirised in
+<i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, to Will&rsquo;s
+knowledge of the artificial style then prevalent in all the
+literatures of Western Europe, and in <a name="page129"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 129</span>England most pleasingly used in
+Lyly&rsquo;s comedies.&nbsp; No, &ldquo;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
+fashionable society of his time, as also with contemporary
+foreign politics.&rdquo; <a name="citation129a"></a><a
+href="#footnote129a" class="citation">[129a]</a></p>
+<p>I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge
+of foreign politics.&nbsp; The embassy 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.&nbsp; I do not see
+in the embassy of the Princess of the story any &ldquo;intimate
+acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics&rdquo; about
+1591&ndash;3.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I am not aware that the author
+shows any &ldquo;intimate acquaintance with the ways&rdquo; of
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s Court, or of any other fashionable society,
+except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation129b"></a><a
+href="#footnote129b" class="citation">[129b]</a> appears to be
+repeating &ldquo;the case as to this very remarkable play&rdquo;
+as &ldquo;well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his <i>Mystery
+of William Shakespeare</i>&rdquo; (p. 44).&nbsp; In that <a
+name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>paralysing
+judicial summary, as we have seen, &ldquo;the author could not
+have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he
+had spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to
+France.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Such was not the Navarre of Henri in his
+war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the sex!</p>
+<p>Such are the &ldquo;contemporary foreign politics,&rdquo; the
+&ldquo;French politics&rdquo; which the author knows&mdash;as
+intimately as Bacon might have known them.&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>These, then, are the arguments in favour of Bacon, or the
+Great Unknown, which are offered with perfect solemnity of
+assurance: and the Baconians repeat them in their little books of
+popularisation and propaganda.&nbsp; <i>Quantula
+sapientia</i>!</p>
+<h2><a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+133</span>VII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS
+AUTHOR</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is absolutely impossible to
+prove that Will, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, was the author
+of the Shakespearean plays and poems.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;Concealed Poet&rdquo; who
+really, at first, did the additions and changes in the
+Company&rsquo;s older manuscript plays, and of the inconceivably
+impudent pretences of Will of Stratford, would have kept the town
+merry for a month.&nbsp; Five or six <a name="page134"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 134</span>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.</p>
+<p>Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties
+in their assumed literary hoax.&nbsp; If Will, like the old
+Hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink, could not even write,
+the hoax was a physical impossibility.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; I am surprised that
+the Baconians have never made that point.&nbsp; Will&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;copy&rdquo; was almost without blot or erasion, the other
+actors were wont to boast.&nbsp; Really the absence of erasions
+and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will
+was <i>not</i> the author.&nbsp; Will merely copied the fair
+copies handed to him by the concealed poet.&nbsp; The farce was
+played for some twenty years, and was either undetected or all
+concerned kept the dread secret&mdash;and all the other companies
+and rival authors were concerned in exposing the imposture.</p>
+<p>The whole story is like the dream of a child.&nbsp; We
+therefore expect the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the
+evidence of Jonson, Heywood, Heminge, and Condell.&nbsp; Their
+attempts take the shape of the most extravagant and complex
+conjectures; with certain petty objections to Ben&rsquo;s various
+estimates of the <i>merits</i> of the <a name="page135"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 135</span>plays.&nbsp; He is constant in his
+witness to the authorship.&nbsp; To these efforts of despair we
+return later, when we hope to justify what is here deliberately
+advanced.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile we study Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Not very
+many literary allusions remain, made during Will&rsquo;s
+life-time, to the plays of Shakespeare.&nbsp; The writers,
+usually, speak of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; or &ldquo;W.
+Shakespeare,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Will Shakespeare,&rdquo; and leave
+it there.&nbsp; In the same way, when they speak of other
+contemporaries, they name them,&mdash;and leave it there, without
+telling us &ldquo;who&rdquo; (Frank) Beaumont, or (Kit) Marlowe,
+or (Robin) Greene, or (Jack) Fletcher, or any of the others
+&ldquo;were.&rdquo;&nbsp; All interested readers knew who they
+were: and also knew who &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; or &ldquo;Will
+Shakespeare&rdquo; was.&nbsp; No other Will Shak(&amp;c.) was
+prominently before the literary and dramatic world, in
+1592&ndash;1616, except the Warwickshire provincial who played
+with Burbage.</p>
+<p>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 <a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+136</span>evidence to identity does not satisfy Mr. Greenwood,
+and the Baconians, where Will is concerned.&nbsp; &ldquo;We
+should expect to find allusions to dramatic and poetical works
+published under the name of &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;; 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.&nbsp; And these, of course,
+we do find; but these are not the objects of our quest.&nbsp;
+What we require is evidence to establish the identity of the
+player with the poet and dramatist; to prove that the player was
+the author of the <i>Plays</i> and <i>Poems</i>.&nbsp;
+<i>That</i> is the proposition to be established, and <i>that</i>
+the allusions fail, as it appears to me, to prove,&rdquo; says
+Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; He adds, &ldquo;At any rate they do not
+disprove the theory that the true authorship was hidden under a
+pseudonym&rdquo; <a name="citation136a"></a><a
+href="#footnote136a" class="citation">[136a]</a>&mdash;which
+raises an entirely different question.</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp;
+But even if the makers of allusions did all this, and said,
+&ldquo;by W. Shakespeare the poet, we mean W. Shakespeare the
+actor&rdquo;&mdash;<i>that</i> is not enough.&nbsp; For <a
+name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 137</span>they may
+all be deceived, may all believe that a bookless, untutored man
+is the author.&nbsp; So we cannot get evidence correct enough for
+Mr. Greenwood.</p>
+<p>Destitute 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.&nbsp; Still, I am,
+like other readers, on the Jury addressed,&mdash;I do not accept
+the arguments.&nbsp; <i>Miror magis</i>, as Mr. Greenwood might
+quote Latin.&nbsp; We have already seen one example of this
+argument, when Heywood speaks of the author of poems by
+Shakespeare, published in <i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>.&nbsp;
+Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the
+author Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; I shall prove that,
+elsewhere, Heywood does identify them, and no man knew more of
+the world of playwrights and actors than Heywood.&nbsp; I add
+that in his remarks on <i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>, Heywood had
+no need to say &ldquo;by W. Shakespeare I mean the well-known
+actor in the King&rsquo;s Company.&rdquo;&nbsp; There was no
+other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.</p>
+<p>It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen
+above, that the allusions &ldquo;disprove the theory that the
+true authorship was hidden under a pseudonym.&rdquo;&nbsp; That
+is an entirely different question.&nbsp; He is now starting quite
+another hare.&nbsp; Men of letters who alluded <a
+name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 138</span>to the
+plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is
+my position.&nbsp; That they may all have been mistaken: that
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; was Bacon&rsquo;s, or any
+one&rsquo;s pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question;
+and we must not allow the critic to glide away into it through an
+&ldquo;at any rate&rdquo;; as he does three or four times.&nbsp;
+So far, then, Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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, &ldquo;This
+Warwickshire man cannot be the author.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to
+Shakspere, real or supposed,&rdquo; says the critic. <a
+name="citation138a"></a><a href="#footnote138a"
+class="citation">[138a]</a>&nbsp; He begins with the hackneyed
+words of the dying man of letters, Robert Greene, in <i>A
+Groatsworth of Wit</i> (1592).&nbsp; The pamphlet is addressed to
+Gentlemen of his acquaintance &ldquo;that spend their wits in
+making plays&rdquo;; he &ldquo;wisheth them a better
+exercise,&rdquo; and better fortunes than his own.&nbsp; (Marlowe
+is supposed to be one of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but
+such suppositions do not here concern us.)&nbsp; Greene&rsquo;s
+is the ancient feud between the players and the authors, between
+capital and labour.&nbsp; The players are the capitalists, and
+buy the plays out and out,&mdash;cheap.&nbsp; The author has no
+royalties; and no control over the future of his work, which a <a
+name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 139</span>Shakspere
+or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the company
+owning the play, may alter as he pleases.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Women fall in love with the actors, not with
+the authors; but with &ldquo;those puppets,&rdquo; as Greene
+says, &ldquo;that speake from our mouths, these anticks,
+garnished in our colours.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben Jonson, we shall see,
+makes some of the same complaints,&mdash;most natural in the
+circumstances: though he managed to retain the control of his
+dramas; how, I do not know.&nbsp; Greene adds that in his
+misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully
+&ldquo;forsaken,&rdquo; by the players, and warns his friends
+that such may be <i>their</i> lot; advising them to seek
+&ldquo;some better exercise.&rdquo;&nbsp; He then
+writes&mdash;and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I
+think, but misunderstood it has been&mdash;&ldquo;Yes, trust them
+not&rdquo; (trust not the players), &ldquo;<span
+class="GutSmall">FOR</span> there is an upstart crow, beautified
+with our feathers, that with his <i>Tyger&rsquo;s heart wrapt in
+a Player&rsquo;s hide</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;Player&rsquo;s&rdquo; in
+place of &ldquo;woman&rsquo;s,&rdquo; in an old play, <i>The
+Tragedy of Richard</i>, <i>Duke of York</i>, &amp;c.),
+&ldquo;supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse
+as the best of you; and being an absolute <i>Johannes
+Factotum</i>, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a
+country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The meaning is pellucid.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do not trust the <a
+name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 140</span>players, my
+fellow playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in
+addition to their glory gained by mouthing <i>our</i> words, and
+their ingratitude, may now forsake you for one of themselves, a
+player, who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of
+yours&rdquo; (including Marlowe&rsquo;s, probably).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The man is ready at their call&rdquo; (&ldquo;an absolute
+<i>Johannes Factotum</i>&rdquo;).&nbsp; &ldquo;In his own
+conceit&rdquo; he is &ldquo;the only Shake-scene in a
+country.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Seek you better masters,&rdquo; than
+these players, who have now an author among themselves,
+&ldquo;the only Shake-scene,&rdquo; where the pun on Shakespeare
+does not look like a fortuitous coincidence.&nbsp; But it may be,
+anything may happen.</p>
+<p>The sense, I repeat, is pellucid.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood
+writes that if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare
+&ldquo;it seems clear that it is as an actor rather than as an
+author he is attacked.&rdquo; <a name="citation140a"></a><a
+href="#footnote140a" class="citation">[140a]</a>&nbsp; As an
+<i>actor</i> the person alluded to is merely assailed with the
+other actors, his &ldquo;fellows.&rdquo;&nbsp; But he is picked
+out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should
+distrust the players, &ldquo;<i>for</i> there is&rdquo; among
+themselves, &ldquo;in a player&rsquo;s hide,&rdquo; &ldquo;an
+upstart crow&rdquo;&mdash;who thinks his blank verse as good as
+the best of theirs.&nbsp; He is, therefore, necessarily a
+playwright, and being a <i>factotum</i>, can readily be employed
+by the players to the prejudice of Greene&rsquo;s three friends,
+who are professed playwrights.</p>
+<p><a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 141</span>Mr.
+Greenwood says that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; <a name="citation141a"></a><a
+href="#footnote141a" class="citation">[141a]</a>&nbsp; But we
+cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us.&nbsp; In addition to
+gaining renown solely through mouthing &ldquo;<i>our</i>&rdquo;
+words, wearing &ldquo;<i>our</i> feathers,&rdquo; they have been
+bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they
+will, in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends;
+&ldquo;yes, for they now have&rdquo; an author, and to the
+playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellowship.&nbsp;
+Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he
+did.&nbsp; He says nothing about the superior financial gains of
+the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the
+&ldquo;only&rdquo; cause of his bitterness.&nbsp; Greene gives
+its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson
+later, in his verses &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo;
+(Playwright-Actor).&nbsp; Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives
+Greene&rsquo;s obvious motives on the very page where he says
+that we do not know them.</p>
+<p>Even Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation141b"></a><a
+href="#footnote141b" class="citation">[141b]</a> anxious as he is
+to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits that the
+words &ldquo;supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a blank
+verse as the best of you,&rdquo; &ldquo;do seem to have that
+implication,&rdquo; <a name="citation141c"></a><a
+href="#footnote141c" class="citation">[141c]</a> namely, that
+&ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; is a dramatic author: <a
+name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 142</span>what else
+can the words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene
+write blank verse?</p>
+<p>Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying &ldquo;it is clear that it
+is as an actor rather than as an author that
+&lsquo;Shake-scene&rsquo; is attacked,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation142a"></a><a href="#footnote142a"
+class="citation">[142a]</a> concedes <a
+name="citation142b"></a><a href="#footnote142b"
+class="citation">[142b]</a> that it &ldquo;certainly looks as if
+he&rdquo; (Greene) &ldquo;meant to suggest that this Shake-scene
+supposed himself able to compose, as well as to mouth
+verses.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nothing else can possibly be meant.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The rest of you&rdquo; were authors, not actors.</p>
+<p>If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should
+&ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; alone be selected for a special
+victim?&nbsp; 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.</p>
+<p>I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in
+the circumstances of the case, &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; is meant
+by Greene for a pun on &ldquo;Shake-speare,&rdquo; or not.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; That other player-author may
+have died young, or faded into obscurity.&nbsp; The term
+&ldquo;the only Shake-scene&rdquo; may be one of those curious
+coincidences <a name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+143</span>which do occur.&nbsp; The presumption lies rather on
+the other side.&nbsp; I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously
+struggling for his case says that, even assuming the validity of
+the surmise that there is an allusion to Shakspere, <a
+name="citation143a"></a><a href="#footnote143a"
+class="citation">[143a]</a> &ldquo;the utmost that we should be
+entitled 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&rdquo; (the
+Great Unknown?).&nbsp; I do more than demur, I defy any man to
+exhibit that sense in Greene&rsquo;s words.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The utmost that we should be entitled to say,&rdquo;
+is, in my opinion, what we have no shadow of a title to
+say.&nbsp; Look at the poor hackneyed, tortured words of Greene
+again.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart
+crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
+<i>Tyger&rsquo;s heart wrapped in a player&rsquo;s hide</i>,
+supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the
+best of you; and being an absolute <i>Johannes Factotum</i>, is
+in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How can mortal man squeeze from these words the charge that
+&ldquo;Player Shakspere&rdquo; is &ldquo;putting forward, as his
+own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was
+really indebted to another&rdquo;?&nbsp; It is as an actor, with
+other actors, that the player is &ldquo;beautified with
+<i>our</i> feathers,&rdquo;&mdash;not with the feathers of some
+one <a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+144</span><i>not</i> ourselves, Bacon or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+Unknown.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood even says that Shake-scene is
+referred to &ldquo;as beautified with the feathers <i>which he
+has stolen</i> from the dramatic writers&rdquo; (&ldquo;our
+feathers&rdquo;).</p>
+<p>Greene says absolutely nothing about feathers &ldquo;<i>which
+he has stolen</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; The &ldquo;feathers,&rdquo; the
+words of the plays, were bought, not stolen, by the actors,
+&ldquo;anticks garnished in our colours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Tedious it is to write many words about words so few and
+simple as those of Greene; meaning &ldquo;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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But &ldquo;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,&rdquo; this is
+&ldquo;the utmost we should be entitled to say,&rdquo; even if
+the allusion be to Shakspere.&nbsp; How does Mr. Greenwood get
+the Anti-Willian hypothesis out of Greene&rsquo;s few and plain
+words?</p>
+<p>It is much safer for him to say that &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo;
+is not meant for Shakespeare.&nbsp; Nobody can prove that it
+<i>is</i>; the pun <i>may</i> be a strange coincidence,&mdash;or
+any one may say that he thinks it nothing more; if he
+pleases.</p>
+<p>Greene nowhere &ldquo;refers to this Shake-scene as being an
+impostor, an upstart crow beautified with the feathers <i>which
+he has stolen from the </i><a name="page145"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 145</span><i>dramatic writers</i> (&ldquo;our
+feathers&rdquo;)&rdquo; <a name="citation145a"></a><a
+href="#footnote145a" class="citation">[145a]</a>&mdash;that is,
+Greene makes no such reference to Shake-scene in his capacity of
+writer of blank verse.&nbsp; Like all players, who are all
+&ldquo;anticks garnisht in our colours,&rdquo; Shake-scene, <i>as
+player</i>, is &ldquo;beautified with our feathers.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It is Mr. Greenwood who adds &ldquo;beautified with the feathers
+which he has <i>stolen</i> from the dramatic
+writers.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We must take Greene&rsquo;s evidence as we find
+it,&mdash;it proves that by &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; he means a
+&ldquo;poet-ape,&rdquo; a playwright-actor; for Greene, like
+Jonson, speaks of actors as &ldquo;apes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Both men
+saw in a certain actor and dramatist a suspected rival.&nbsp;
+Only one such successful practising actor-playwright is known to
+us at this date (1592&ndash;1601),&mdash;and he is
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; Unless another such existed, Greene, in 1592,
+alludes to William Shak(&amp;c.) as a player and
+playwright.&nbsp; This proves that the actor from Stratford was
+accepted in Greene&rsquo;s world as an author of plays in blank
+verse.&nbsp; He cannot, therefore, have seemed incapable of his
+poetry.</p>
+<p>Let us now briefly consider other contemporary allusions to
+Shakespeare selected by Mr. Greenwood himself.&nbsp; No allusion
+can prove that Shakespeare was the author of the work attributed
+to him in the allusions.&nbsp; The plays and poems <i>may</i>
+have <a name="page146"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+146</span>been by James VI and I, &ldquo;a
+parcel-poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Omitting some remarks by Chettle on
+Greene&rsquo;s <i>Groatsworth of Wit</i>, <a
+name="citation146a"></a><a href="#footnote146a"
+class="citation">[146a]</a> as, if grammar goes for all, they do
+not refer to Shakespeare, we have the Cambridge farce or comedy
+on contemporary literature, the <i>Return from Parnassus</i>
+(1602?).&nbsp; The University wits laugh at
+Shakespeare,&mdash;not an university man, as the favourite poet,
+in his <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, of a silly braggart pretender to
+literature, Gullio.</p>
+<p>They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, speaking to Burbage, the chief
+tragic actor, of Shakespeare as a member of their company, who,
+<i>as an author of plays</i>, &ldquo;puts down&rdquo; the
+University wits &ldquo;and Ben Jonson too.&rdquo;&nbsp; The date
+is not earlier than that of Ben&rsquo;s satiric play on the
+poets, <i>The Poetaster</i> (1601), to which reference is
+made.&nbsp; Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant,
+his opinion of Shakespeare&rsquo;s pre-eminent merit only proves,
+as in the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the
+excellences of Shakespeare.&nbsp; In him they saw no scholar.</p>
+<p>The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor
+and author.</p>
+<p>All this &ldquo;is quite consistent with the theory <a
+name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 147</span>that
+Shake-speare was a pseudonym,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation147a"></a><a href="#footnote147a"
+class="citation">[147a]</a> says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; Of course
+it is, but it is <i>not</i> consistent with the theory that
+Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless rustic, for, in that
+case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an hour.&nbsp;
+Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if you will, that
+<i>he</i> thought that <i>Kempe</i> thought, that his fellow
+player was the author.&nbsp; But we have better evidence of what
+the actors thought than in the Cambridge play.</p>
+<p>In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in <i>Palladis Tamia</i>
+credits Shakespeare with <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, with privately
+circulated sonnets, and with a number of the comedies and
+tragedies.&nbsp; How the allusions &ldquo;negative the hypothesis
+that Shakespeare was a <i>nom de plume</i> is not
+apparent,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his
+method.&nbsp; I repeat that he wanders from the point, which is,
+here, that the only William Shak(&amp;c.) known to us at the
+time, in London, was credited with the plays and poems on all
+sides, which proves that no incompatibility between the man and
+the works was recognised.</p>
+<p>Then Weaver (1599) alludes to him as author of <i>Venus</i>,
+<i>Lucrece</i>, <i>Romeo</i>, <i>Richard</i>, &ldquo;more whose
+names I know not.&rdquo;&nbsp; Davies (1610) calls him &ldquo;our
+English Terence&rdquo; (the famous comedian), and mentions him as
+having &ldquo;played some Kingly parts in sport.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Freeman (1614) credits him with <i>Venus</i> and
+<i>Lucrece</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;Besides in <a
+name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 148</span>plays thy
+wit winds like Meander.&rdquo;&nbsp; I repeat Heywood&rsquo;s
+evidence.&nbsp; Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable
+domestic play, <i>A Woman Killed with Kindness</i>, was, from the
+old days of Henslowe, in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and
+an actor; he survived into the reign of Charles I.&nbsp; Writing
+on the familiar names of the poets, &ldquo;Jack Fletcher,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Frank Beaumont,&rdquo; &ldquo;Kit Marlowe,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Tom Nash,&rdquo; he says,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting
+quill<br />
+Commanded mirth and passion, was but
+&lsquo;Will.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author?&nbsp; No
+quibbles serve against the evidence.</p>
+<p>We need not pursue the allusions later than
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, or invoke, at present, Ben
+Jonson&rsquo;s panegyric of 1623.&nbsp; As to Davies, his dull
+and obscure epigram is addressed &ldquo;To our English Terence,
+Mr. Will Shake-speare.&rdquo;&nbsp; He accosts Shakespeare as
+&ldquo;Good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp; He remarks that, &ldquo;as some
+say,&rdquo; if Will &ldquo;had not played some Kingly parts in
+sport,&rdquo; he had been &ldquo;a companion for a
+<i>King</i>,&rdquo; and &ldquo;been a King among the meaner
+sort.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nobody, now, can see the allusion and the
+joke.&nbsp; Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, in 1604, acted a play on
+the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600.&nbsp; King James suppressed the
+play after the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the
+stage throughout the action: and in very droll and dreadful
+situations.&nbsp; Did Will take the <a name="page149"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 149</span>King&rsquo;s part, and annoy gentle
+King Jamie, &ldquo;as some say&rdquo;?&nbsp; Nobody knows.&nbsp;
+But Mr. Greenwood, to disable Davies&rsquo;s recognition of Mr.
+Will as a playwright, &ldquo;Our English Terence,&rdquo; quotes,
+from Florio&rsquo;s <i>Montaigne</i>, a silly old piece of Roman
+literary gossip, Terence&rsquo;s plays were written by Scipio and
+Laelius.&nbsp; In fact, Terence alludes in his prologue to the
+<i>Adelphi</i>, to a spiteful report that he was aided by great
+persons.&nbsp; The prologue may be the source of the
+fable&mdash;that does not matter.&nbsp; Davies might get the
+fable in Montaigne, and, knowing that some Great One wrote
+Will&rsquo;s plays, might therefore, in irony, address him as
+&ldquo;Our English Terence.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is a pretty free
+conjecture!&nbsp; In Roman comedy he had only two names known to
+him to choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus.&nbsp; But if
+Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have
+shared <i>le Secret de Polichinelle</i>.&nbsp; Yet none hints at
+it, and only a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as
+the off-chance that Davies <i>knew</i>, and used
+&ldquo;Terence&rdquo; as a gibe. <a name="citation149a"></a><a
+href="#footnote149a" class="citation">[149a]</a></p>
+<p>The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the
+actor wrote the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have
+done so, and therefore that he was not so ignorant and bookless
+as to demonstrate that he was incapable of the poetry and the
+knowledge displayed in his <a name="page150"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 150</span>works.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood himself
+observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when he makes Will
+incapable of writing.&nbsp; Such a Will could deceive no mortal.
+<a name="citation150a"></a><a href="#footnote150a"
+class="citation">[150a]</a>&nbsp; But does Mr. Greenwood, who
+finds in the Author of the plays &ldquo;much learning, and
+remarkable classical attainments,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a wide
+familiarity with the classics,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation150b"></a><a href="#footnote150b"
+class="citation">[150b]</a> suppose that his absolutely bookless
+Will could have persuaded his intimates that he was the author of
+plays exhibiting &ldquo;a wide familiarity with the
+classics,&rdquo; or &ldquo;remarkable classical
+attainments.&rdquo;&nbsp; The thing is wholly impossible.</p>
+<p>I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to
+Shakespeare speaks of him as &ldquo;learned,&rdquo; erudite,
+scholarly, and so forth.&nbsp; The epithets for him are
+&ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; &ldquo;gentle,&rdquo; &ldquo;honeyed,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;sugared,&rdquo; &ldquo;honey-tongued&rdquo;&mdash;this is
+the convention.&nbsp; The tradition followed by Milton, who was
+eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote
+<i>L&rsquo;Allegro</i> just after leaving Cambridge, makes
+Shakespeare &ldquo;sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy&rsquo;s
+child,&rdquo; with &ldquo;native wood-notes wild&rdquo;; and
+gives to Jonson &ldquo;the <i>learned</i> sock.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of
+Shakespeare, namely, in 1608.&nbsp; Like Milton he was a
+Cambridge man.&nbsp; The First Folio of Shakespeare&rsquo;s works
+appeared when each of these two bookish men was aged
+fifteen.&nbsp; It would necessarily revive interest in
+Shakespeare, now <a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+151</span>first known as far as about half of his plays went: he
+would be discussed among lovers of literature at Cambridge.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller&rsquo;s remark that
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s &ldquo;learning was very little,&rdquo; that,
+if alive, he would confess himself &ldquo;to be never any
+scholar.&rdquo; <a name="citation151a"></a><a
+href="#footnote151a" class="citation">[151a]</a>&nbsp; I cannot
+grant that Fuller is dividing the persons of actor and
+author.&nbsp; Men of Shakespeare&rsquo;s generation, such as
+Jonson, did not think him learned; nor did men of the next
+generation.&nbsp; If Mr. Collins&rsquo;s view be correct, the men
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s and of Milton&rsquo;s generations were too
+ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was deeply learned in the
+literature of Rome, and in the literature of Greece.&nbsp; Every
+one was too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.</p>
+<h2><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>VIII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">&ldquo;THE SILENCE OF PHILIP
+HENSLOWE&rdquo;</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span> Shakespeare is mentioned as an
+author by contemporary writers, the Baconian stratagem, we have
+seen, is to cry, &ldquo;Ah, but you cannot prove the author
+mentioned to be the actor.&rdquo;&nbsp; We have seen that Meres
+(1598) speaks of Shakespeare as the leading tragic and comic poet
+(&ldquo;Poor poet-ape that would be thought our chief,&rdquo;
+quoth Jonson), as author of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, and as a
+sonneteer.&nbsp; &ldquo;All this does nothing whatever to support
+the idea that the Stratford player was the author of the plays
+and poems alluded to,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, playing that
+card again. <a name="citation155a"></a><a href="#footnote155a"
+class="citation">[155a]</a></p>
+<p>The allusions, I repeat, <i>do</i> prove that Shak(&amp;c.),
+the actor, was believed to be the author, till any other noted
+William Shak(&amp;c.) is found to have been conspicuously before
+the town.&nbsp; &ldquo;There is nothing at all to prove that
+Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge of
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is nothing at all to prove that
+Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge of
+nine-tenths of the English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he
+<a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+156</span>mentions.&nbsp; &ldquo;On the question&mdash;who was
+Shakespeare?&mdash;he throws no light.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+&ldquo;throws no light on the question&rdquo; &ldquo;who
+was?&rdquo; any of the poets mentioned by him, except one, quite
+forgotten, whose College he names . . . To myself this &ldquo;sad
+repeated air,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;critics who praise Shakespeare
+do not say <i>who Shakespeare</i> was,&rdquo;&mdash;would appear
+to be, not an argument, but a subterfuge: though Mr. Greenwood
+honestly believes it to be an argument,&mdash;otherwise he would
+not use it: much less would he repeat it with frequent
+iteration.&nbsp; The more a man was notorious, as was Will
+Shakspere the actor, the less the need for any critic to tell his
+public &ldquo;who Shakespeare was.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when
+Shakespeare is alluded to as an author, so he tries to better his
+case when, in the account-book of Philip Henslowe, an owner of
+theatres, money-lender, pawn-broker, purchaser of plays from
+authors, and so forth, Shakespeare is <i>not</i> mentioned at
+all.&nbsp; Here is a mystery which, properly handled, may advance
+the great cause.&nbsp; Henslowe has notes of loans of money to
+several actors, some of them of Shakespeare&rsquo;s company,
+&ldquo;The Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no
+such note of a loan to Shakespeare.&nbsp; Does this prove that he
+was not an actor?&nbsp; If so, Burbage was not an actor; Henslowe
+never names him.</p>
+<p>There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after each
+performance of any play in one of his theatres.&nbsp; In these
+notes <i>the name of Shakespeare </i><a name="page157"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 157</span><i>is never once mentioned as the
+author of any play</i>.&nbsp; How weird!&nbsp; But in
+<i>these</i> notes the names of the authors of the plays acted
+are never mentioned.&nbsp; Does this suggest that Bacon wrote all
+these plays?</p>
+<p>On the other hand, there are frequent mentions of advances of
+money to authors who were working at plays for Henslowe, singly,
+or in pairs, threes, fours, or fives.&nbsp; We find Drayton,
+Dekker, Chapman, and nine authors now forgotten by all but
+antiquarians.&nbsp; We have also Ben Jonson (1597), Marston,
+Munday, Middleton, Webster, and others, authors in
+Henslowe&rsquo;s pay.&nbsp; <i>But the same of Shakespeare never
+appears</i>.&nbsp; Mysterious!&nbsp; The other men&rsquo;s names,
+writes Dr. Furness, occur &ldquo;because they were all writers
+for Henslowe&rsquo;s theatre, but we must wait at all events for
+the discovery of some other similar record, before we can produce
+corresponding memoranda regarding Shaksper&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>)
+&ldquo;and his productions.&rdquo; <a name="citation157a"></a><a
+href="#footnote157a" class="citation">[157a]</a></p>
+<p>The natural mind of the ordinary man explains all by saying,
+&ldquo;Henslowe records no loans of money to Shakspere the actor,
+because he lent him no money.&nbsp; He records no payments for
+plays to Shakespeare the author-actor, because to Henslowe the
+actor sold no plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is the whole explanation
+of the Silence of Philip Henslowe.&nbsp; If Shakspere did sell a
+play to Henslowe, why should that financier omit the fact from
+his accounts?&nbsp; Suppose that the actor was illiterate <a
+name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 158</span>as
+Baconians fervently believe, and sold Bacon&rsquo;s plays, what
+prevented him from selling a play of Bacon&rsquo;s (under his own
+name, as usual) to Henslowe?&nbsp; To obtain a Baconian reply you
+must wander into conjecture, and imagine that Bacon forbade the
+transaction.&nbsp; Then <i>why</i> did he forbid it?&nbsp;
+Because he could get a better price from Shakspere&rsquo;s
+company?&nbsp; The same cause would produce the same effect on
+Shakspere himself; whether he were the author, or were
+Bacon&rsquo;s, or any man&rsquo;s go-between.&nbsp; On any score
+but that of money, why was Henslowe good enough for Ben Jonson,
+Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and Webster, and not good enough for
+Bacon, who did not appear in the matter at all, but was
+represented in it by the actor, Will?&nbsp; As a gentleman and a
+man of the Court, Bacon would be as much discredited if he were
+known to sell (for &pound;6 on an average) his noble works to the
+Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s Company, as if he sold them to
+Henslowe.</p>
+<p>I know not whether the great lawyer, courtier, scholar, and
+philosopher is supposed by Baconians to have given Will Shakspere
+a commission on his sales of plays; or to have let him keep the
+whole sum in each case.&nbsp; I know not whether the players paid
+Shakspere a sum down for his (or Bacon&rsquo;s) plays, or whether
+Will received a double share, or other, or any share of the
+profits on them, as Henslowe did when he let a house to the
+players.&nbsp; Nobody knows any of these things.</p>
+<p><a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+159</span>&ldquo;If Shakspere the player had been a dramatist,
+surely Henslowe would have employed him also, like the others, in
+that behalf.&rdquo; <a name="citation159a"></a><a
+href="#footnote159a" class="citation">[159a]</a>&nbsp; Henslowe
+would, if he could have got the &ldquo;copy&rdquo; cheap
+enough.&nbsp; Was any one of &ldquo;the others,&rdquo; the
+playwrights, a player, holding a share in his company?&nbsp; If
+not, the fact makes an essential difference, for Shakspere
+<i>was</i> a shareholder.&nbsp; Collier, in his preface to
+Henslowe&rsquo;s so-called &ldquo;Diary,&rdquo; mentions a
+playwright who was bound to scribble for Henslowe only (Henry
+Porter), and another, Chettle, who was bound to write only for
+the company protected by the Earl of Nottingham. <a
+name="citation159b"></a><a href="#footnote159b"
+class="citation">[159b]</a>&nbsp; Modern publishers and managers
+sometimes make the same terms with novelists and playwrights.</p>
+<p>It appears to me that Shakspere&rsquo;s company would be
+likely, as his plays were very popular, to make the same sort of
+agreement with him, and to give him such terms as he would be
+glad to accept,&mdash;whether the wares were his own&mdash;or
+Bacon&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He was a keen man of business.&nbsp; In such
+a case, he would not write for Henslowe&rsquo;s pittance.&nbsp;
+He had a better market.&nbsp; The plays, whether written by
+himself, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, were at his disposal,
+and he did not dispose of them to Henslowe, wherefore Henslowe
+cannot mention him in his accounts.&nbsp; That is all.</p>
+<p><a name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+160</span>Quoting an American Judge (Dr. Stotsenburg,
+apparently), Mr. Greenwood cites the circumstance that, in two
+volumes of Alleyn&rsquo;s papers &ldquo;there is not one mention
+of such a poet as William Shaksper in his list of actors, poets,
+and theatrical comrades.&rdquo; <a name="citation160a"></a><a
+href="#footnote160a" class="citation">[160a]</a>&nbsp; If this
+means that Shakspere is not mentioned by Alleyn among actors, are
+we to infer that William was not an actor?&nbsp; Even Baconians
+insist that he was an actor.&nbsp; &ldquo;How strange, how more
+than strange,&rdquo; cries Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;that Henslowe
+should make no mention in all this long diary, embracing all the
+time from 1591 to 1609, of the actor-author . . . No
+matter.&nbsp; <i>Credo quia impossibile</i>!&rdquo; <a
+name="citation160b"></a><a href="#footnote160b"
+class="citation">[160b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Credo</i> what? and what is
+<i>impossible</i>?&nbsp; Henslowe&rsquo;s volume is no Diary; he
+does not tell a single anecdote of any description; he merely
+enters loans, gains, payments.&nbsp; Does Henslowe mention, say,
+Ben Jonson, <i>when he is not doing business with Ben</i>?&nbsp;
+Does he mention any actor or author except in connection with
+money matters?&nbsp; Then, if he did no business with Shakspere
+the actor, in borrowing or lending, and did no business with
+Shakespeare the author, in borrowing, lending, buying or selling,
+&ldquo;How strange, how more than strange&rdquo; it would be if
+Henslowe <i>did</i> mention Shakespeare!&nbsp; He was not keeping
+a journal of literary and dramatic jottings.&nbsp; He was keeping
+an account of his expenses <a name="page161"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 161</span>and receipts.&nbsp; He never names
+Richard Burbage any more than he mentions Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood again expresses his views about this dark
+suspicious mystery, the absence of Shakespeare or Shakspere (or
+Shak, as you like it), from Henslowe&rsquo;s accounts, if
+Shak(&amp;c.) wrote plays.&nbsp; But the mystery, if mystery
+there be, is just as obscure if the actor were the channel
+through which Bacon&rsquo;s plays reached the stage, for the
+pretended author of these masterpieces.&nbsp; Shak&mdash;was not
+the man to do all the troking, bargaining, lying, going here and
+there, and making himself a motley to the view for &pound;0,
+0<i>s.</i> 0<i>d.</i>&nbsp; If he were a sham, a figure-head, a
+liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts, <i>he would be paid
+for it</i>.&nbsp; But he did not deal with Henslowe in his
+bargainings, and <i>that</i> is why Henslowe does not mention
+him.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, in one place, <a
+name="citation161a"></a><a href="#footnote161a"
+class="citation">[161a]</a> agrees, so far, with me.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Why did Henslowe not mention Shakespeare as the writer of
+other plays&rdquo; (than <i>Titus Andronicus</i> and <i>Henry
+VI</i>)?&nbsp; &ldquo;I think the answer is simple
+enough.&rdquo;&nbsp; (So do I.)&nbsp; &ldquo;Neither Shakspere
+nor &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; ever wrote for
+Henslowe!&rdquo;&nbsp; The obvious is perceived at last; and the
+reason given is &ldquo;that he was above Henslowe&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;skyline,&rsquo;&rdquo; &ldquo;he&rdquo; being the
+Author.&nbsp; We only differ as to <i>why</i> the author was
+above Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;sky-line.&rdquo;&nbsp; I say,
+because good Will had a better market, that of his Company.&nbsp;
+I understand <a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+162</span>Mr. Greenwood to think,&mdash;because the Great Unknown
+was too great a man to deal with Henslowe.&nbsp; If to write for
+the stage were discreditable, to deal (unknown) with Henslowe was
+no more disgraceful than to deal with &ldquo;a cry of
+players&rdquo;; and as (unknown) Will did the bargaining, the
+Great Unknown was as safe with Will in one case as in the
+other.&nbsp; If Will did not receive anything for the plays from
+his own company (who firmly believed in his authorship), they
+must have said, &ldquo;Will! dost thou serve the Muses and thy
+obliged fellows for naught?&nbsp; Dost thou give us two popular
+plays yearly,&mdash;gratis?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Do you not see that, in the interests of the Great Secret
+itself, Will <i>had</i> to take the pay for the plays (pretended
+his) from somebody.&nbsp; Will Shakspere making his dear fellows
+and friends a present of two masterpieces yearly was too
+incredible.&nbsp; So I suppose he did have royalties on the
+receipts, or otherwise got his money; and, as he certainly did
+not get them from Henslowe, Henslowe had no conceivable reason
+for entering Will&rsquo;s name in his accounts.</p>
+<p>Such are the reflections of a plain man, but to an imaginative
+soul there seems to be a brooding mist, with a heart of fire,
+which half conceals and half reveals the darkened chamber wherein
+abides &ldquo;The Silence of Philip Henslowe.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The Silence of Philip Henslowe,&rdquo; Mr. Greenwood
+writes, &ldquo;is a very remarkable phenomenon . . .
+&rdquo;&nbsp; It is a phenomenon <a name="page163"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 163</span>precisely as remarkable as the
+absence of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s name from the accounts of a
+boot-maker with whom he has never had any dealings.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If, however, there was a man in high position, &lsquo;a
+concealed poet,&rsquo;&rdquo; who &ldquo;took the works of others
+and rewrote and transformed them, besides bringing out original
+plays of his own . . . then it is natural enough that his name
+should not appear among those [of the] for the most part
+impecunious dramatists to whom Henslowe paid money for
+playwriting.&rdquo; <a name="citation163a"></a><a
+href="#footnote163a" class="citation">[163a]</a>&nbsp; Nothing
+can be more natural, and, in fact, the name of Bacon, or
+Southampton, or James VI, or Sir John Ramsay, or Sir Walter
+Raleigh, or Sir Fulke Greville, or any other &ldquo;man in high
+position,&rdquo; does <i>not</i> appear in Henslowe&rsquo;s
+accounts.&nbsp; Nor does the name of William Shak(&amp;c.).&nbsp;
+But why should it not appear if Will sold either his own plays,
+or those of the noble friend to whom he lent his name and
+personality&mdash;to Henslowe?&nbsp; Why not?</p>
+<p>Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great
+&ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; &ldquo;of high position,&rdquo; who
+can &ldquo;bring out original plays of his own,&rdquo; and yet
+&ldquo;takes the works of others,&rdquo; say of &ldquo;sporting
+Kyd,&rdquo; or of Dekker and Chettle, and such poor
+devils,&mdash;<i>takes</i> them as a Yankee pirate-publisher
+takes my rhymes,&mdash;and &ldquo;rewrites and transforms
+them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bacon (or Bungay) <i>cannot</i> &ldquo;take&rdquo; them
+without permission of their legal owners,&mdash;Shakspere&rsquo;s
+<a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 164</span>or any
+other company;&mdash;of any one, in short, who, as Ben Jonson
+says, &ldquo;buys up reversions of old plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; How is
+he to manage these shabby dealings?&nbsp; Apparently he employs
+Will Shakspere, spells his own &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; and has his rewritings and
+transformations of the destitute author&rsquo;s work acted by
+Will&rsquo;s company.&nbsp; What a situation for Bacon, or Sir
+Fulke Greville, or James VI, or any &ldquo;man in high
+position&rdquo; whom fancy can suggest!&nbsp; The plays by the
+original authors, whoever they were, could only be obtained by
+the &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; and &ldquo;man in high
+position&rdquo; from the legal owners, Shakspere&rsquo;s company,
+usually.&nbsp; The concealed poet had to negotiate with the
+owners, and Bacon (or whoever he was) employed that scamp Will
+Shakspere, first, I think, to extract the plays from the owners,
+and then to pretend that he himself, even Will, had
+&ldquo;rewritten and transformed them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how
+certain it was that Will would blackmail the &ldquo;man in high
+position&rdquo;!&nbsp; &ldquo;Doubtless&rdquo; he did: we find
+Bacon arrested for debt, more than once, while Will buys New
+Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted from the concealed
+poet of high position. <a name="citation164a"></a><a
+href="#footnote164a" class="citation">[164a]</a>&nbsp; Bacon did
+associate with that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham,
+who forged a postscript to Mary Stuart&rsquo;s letter to
+Babington.&nbsp; But now, if not Bacon, then some other concealed
+poet of high position, with a <a name="page165"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 165</span>mysterious passion for rewriting and
+transforming plays by sad, needy authors, is in close contact
+with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire poacher and ignorant
+butcher&rsquo;s boy, country schoolmaster, draper&rsquo;s
+apprentice, <i>enfin</i>, <i>tout le tremblement</i>.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;How strange, how more than strange!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as
+March 3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for
+the performances of many plays.&nbsp; He was paid as owner or
+lessee of the House used by this or that company.&nbsp; On March
+3, 1591, the play acted by &ldquo;Lord Strange&rsquo;s
+(Derby&rsquo;s) men&rdquo; was <i>Henry VI</i>.&nbsp; Several
+other plays with names familiar in Shakespeare&rsquo;s Works,
+such as <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, all the three parts of <i>Henry
+VI</i>, <i>King Leare</i> (April 6, 1593), <i>Henry V</i> (May
+14, 1592), <i>The Taming of a Shrew</i> (June 11, 1594), and
+<i>Hamlet</i>, paid toll to Henslowe.&nbsp; He
+&ldquo;received&rdquo; so much, on each occasion, when they were
+acted in a theatre of his.&nbsp; But he never records his
+purchase of these plays; and it is not generally believed that
+Shakespeare was the author of all these plays, in the form which
+they bore in 1591&ndash;4: though there is much difference of
+opinion.</p>
+<p>There is one rather interesting case.&nbsp; On August 25,
+1594, Henslowe enters &ldquo;<i>ne</i>&rdquo; (that is, &ldquo;a
+new play&rdquo;) &ldquo;Received at the Venesyon Comodey,
+eighteen pence.&rdquo;&nbsp; That was his share of the
+receipts.&nbsp; The Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s Company, <a
+name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 166</span>that of
+Shakespeare, was playing in Henslowe&rsquo;s theatre at Newington
+Butts.&nbsp; If the &ldquo;Venesyon Comodey&rdquo; (Venetian
+Comedy) were <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>, this is the first
+mention of it.&nbsp; But nobody knows what Henslowe meant by
+&ldquo;the Venesyon Comodey.&rdquo;&nbsp; He does not mention the
+author&rsquo;s name, because, in this part of his accounts he
+never does mention the author or authors.&nbsp; He only names
+them when he buys from, or lends to, or has other money dealings
+with the authors.&nbsp; He had none with Shakespeare, hence the
+Silence of Philip Henslowe.</p>
+<h2><a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+167</span>IX<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE&mdash;HIS
+MONUMENT AND PORTRAITS</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the chapter on the
+Preoccupations of Bacon the reader may find help in making up his
+mind as to whether Bacon, with his many and onerous duties and
+occupations, his scientific studies, and his absorbing scientific
+preoccupation, is a probable author of the Shakespearean
+plays.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood finds the young Shakspere
+impossible&mdash;because of his ignorance&mdash;which made him
+such a really good pseudo-author, and such a successful mask for
+Bacon, or Bacon&rsquo;s unknown equivalent.&nbsp; The Shakspere
+of later life, the well-to-do Shakspere, the purchaser of the
+right to bear arms; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager
+a creditor; a would-be encloser of a common; a man totally
+bookless, is, to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s mind, an impossible author
+of the later plays.</p>
+<p>Here, first, are moral objections on the ground of character
+as revealed in some legal documents concerning business.&nbsp;
+Now, I am very ready to confess that William&rsquo;s dealings
+with his debtors, and with one creditor, are wholly unlike what I
+should expect from the author of the plays.&nbsp; Moreover, <a
+name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 170</span>the conduct
+of Shelley in regard to his wife was, in my opinion, very mean
+and cruel, and the last thing that we could have expected from
+one who, in verse, was such a tender philanthropist, and in life
+was&mdash;women apart&mdash;the best-hearted of men.&nbsp; The
+conduct of Robert Burns, alas, too often disappoints the lover of
+his <i>Cottar&rsquo;s Saturday Night</i> and other moral
+pieces.&nbsp; He was an inconsistent walker.</p>
+<p>I sincerely wish that Shakespeare had been less hard in money
+matters, just as I wish that in financial matters Scott had been
+more like himself, that he had not done the last things that we
+should have expected him to do.&nbsp; As a member of the Scottish
+Bar it was inconsistent with his honour to be the secret
+proprietor of a publishing and a printing business.&nbsp; This is
+the unexplained moral paradox in the career of a man of
+chivalrous honour and strict probity: but the fault did not
+prevent Scott from writing his novels and poems.&nbsp; Why, then,
+should the few bare records of Shakspere&rsquo;s monetary
+transactions make <i>his</i> authorship impossible?&nbsp; The
+objection seems weakly sentimental.</p>
+<p>Macaulay scolds Scott as fiercely as Mr. Greenwood scolds
+Shakspere,&mdash;for the more part, ignorantly and
+unjustly.&nbsp; Still, there is matter to cause surprise and
+regret.&nbsp; Both Scott and Shakspere are accused of writing for
+gain, and of spending money on lands and houses with the desire
+to found families.&nbsp; But in the mysterious <a
+name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 171</span>mixture of
+each human personality, any sober soul who reflects on his own
+sins and failings will not think other men&rsquo;s failings
+incompatible with intellectual excellence.&nbsp; Bacon&rsquo;s
+own conduct in money matters was that of a man equally grasping
+and extravagant.&nbsp; Ben Jonson thus describes Shakespeare as a
+social character: &ldquo;He was indeed honest, and of an open and
+free nature . . . I loved the man and do honour his memory on
+this side idolatry as much as any.&rdquo;&nbsp; Perhaps Ben never
+owed money to Shakspere and refused to pay!</p>
+<p>We must not judge a man&rsquo;s whole intellectual character,
+and declare him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few
+legal papers about matters of business.&nbsp; Apparently
+Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out
+of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of
+the town was floundering,&mdash;pursued by the distraint of one
+of the friendly family of Quiney&mdash;Adrian Quiney.&nbsp; They
+were neighbours and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. <a
+name="citation171a"></a><a href="#footnote171a"
+class="citation">[171a]</a>&nbsp; I do not, like Mr. Greenwood,
+see anything &ldquo;at all out of the way&rdquo; in the
+circumstance &ldquo;that a man should be writing <i>Hamlet</i>,
+and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on loan
+at some unspecified interest.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation171b"></a><a href="#footnote171b"
+class="citation">[171b]</a>&nbsp; Nor do I see anything at all
+out of the way in Bacon&rsquo;s prosecution of his friend and
+benefactor, <a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+172</span>Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing
+<i>Hamlet</i>.&nbsp; Indeed, Shakspere&rsquo;s case is the less
+&ldquo;out of the way&rdquo; of the two.&nbsp; He wanted his loan
+to be repaid, and told his lawyer to bring an action.&nbsp; Bacon
+wanted to keep his head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders;
+or to keep his body out of the Tower; or he merely, as he
+declares, wanted to do his duty as a lawyer of the Crown.&nbsp;
+In any case, Bacon was in a tragic position almost unexampled;
+and was at once overwhelmed by work, and, one must suppose, by
+acute distress of mind, in the case of Essex.&nbsp; He must have
+felt this the more keenly, if, as some Baconians vow, <i>he wrote
+the Sonnets to Essex</i>.&nbsp; Whether he were writing his
+<i>Hamlet</i> when engaged in Essex&rsquo;s case (1601), or any
+other of his dramatic masterpieces, even this astonishing man
+must have been sorely bestead to combine so many branches of
+business.</p>
+<p>Thus I would reply to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s amazement that
+Shakspere, a hard creditor, and so forth, should none the less
+have been able to write his plays.&nbsp; But if it is meant that
+a few business transactions must have absorbed the whole
+consciousness of Shakespeare, and left him neither time nor
+inclination for poetry, consider the scientific preoccupation of
+Bacon, his parliamentary duties, his ceaseless activity as
+&ldquo;one of the legal body-guard of the Queen&rdquo; at a time
+when he had often to be examining persons accused of
+conspiracy,&mdash;and do not forget his long and <a
+name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 173</span>poignant
+anxiety about Essex, his constant efforts to reconcile him with
+Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause without losing her favour;
+and, finally, the anguish of prosecuting his friend, and of
+knowing how hardly the world judged his own conduct.&nbsp; Follow
+him into his relations with James I; his eager pursuit of favour,
+the multiplicity of his affairs, his pecuniary distresses, and
+the profound study and severe labour entailed by the preparation
+for and the composition of <i>The Advancement of Learning</i>
+(1603&ndash;5).&nbsp; He must be a stout-hearted Baconian who can
+believe that, between 1599 and 1605, Bacon was writing
+<i>Hamlet</i>, and other masterpieces of tragedy or comedy.&nbsp;
+But all is possible to genius.&nbsp; What Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+Great Unknown was doing at this period, &ldquo;neither does he
+know, nor do I know, but he only.&rdquo;&nbsp; He, no doubt, had
+abundance of leisure.</p>
+<p>At last Shakspere died (1616), and had not the mead of one
+melodious tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the
+shape of obituary verses.&nbsp; This fills Mr. Greenwood with
+amazement.&nbsp; &ldquo;Was it because &lsquo;the friends of the
+Muses&rsquo; were for the most part aware that Shakespeare had
+not died with Shakspere?&rdquo;&nbsp; Did Jonson perchance think
+that his idea might be realised when he wrote,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;What a sight it were,<br
+/>
+To see thee in our waters yet appear&rdquo;?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and so on.&nbsp; Did Jonson expect and hope to see <a
+name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 174</span>the genuine
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; return to the stage, seven years after
+the death of Shakspere the actor, the Swan of Avon?&nbsp; As
+Jonson was fairly sane, we can no more suspect him of having
+hoped for this miracle than believe that most of the poets knew
+the actor not to be the author.&nbsp; Moreover Jonson, while
+desiring that Shakespeare might &ldquo;shine forth&rdquo; again
+and cheer the drooping stage, added,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Which since thy flight from hence hath
+mourned like Night,<br />
+And despairs day, but for thy volume&rsquo;s light,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>that is&mdash;the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; Ben did not weave the
+amazing tissue of involved and contradictory falsities attributed
+to him by Baconians.&nbsp; Beaumont died in the same year as
+Shakspere, who died in the depths of the country, weary of
+London.&nbsp; Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary poems dropped on
+the grave of the famous Beaumont?&nbsp; Did Fletcher, did Jonson,
+produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend; in
+Fletcher&rsquo;s case his constant partner?&nbsp; No?&nbsp; Were
+the poets, then, aware that Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems
+and plays were written by Bacon? <a name="citation174a"></a><a
+href="#footnote174a" class="citation">[174a]</a></p>
+<p>I am not to discuss Shakespeare&rsquo;s Will, the
+&ldquo;second-best bed,&rdquo; and so forth.&nbsp; But as
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s Will says not a word about his books, it is
+decided by Mr. Greenwood that he had no books.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood is a lawyer; so was my late friend Mr. Charles Elton,
+Q.C., of White Staunton, <a name="page175"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 175</span>who remarks that Shakespeare
+bequeathed &ldquo;all the rest of my goods, chattels, leases,
+&amp;c., to my son-in-law, John Hall, gent.&rdquo;&nbsp; (He
+really <i>was</i> a &ldquo;gent.&rdquo; with authentic
+coat-armour.)</p>
+<p>It is with Mr. Elton&rsquo;s opinion, not with my ignorance,
+that Mr. Greenwood must argue in proof of the view that
+&ldquo;goods&rdquo; are necessarily exclusive of books, for Mr.
+Elton takes it as a quite natural fact that Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+books passed, with his other goods, to Mr. Hall, and thence to a
+Mr. Nash, to whom Mr. Hall left &ldquo;my study of books&rdquo;
+<a name="citation175a"></a><a href="#footnote175a"
+class="citation">[175a]</a> (library).&nbsp; I only give this as
+a lawyer&rsquo;s opinion.</p>
+<p>There is in the Bodleian an Aldine Ovid, &ldquo;with
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo; signature (merely Wm. She.), and a
+note, &ldquo;This little volume of Ovid was given to me by W.
+Hall, who sayd it was once Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I do not know that the signature (like that on Florio&rsquo;s
+<i>Montaigne</i>, in the British Museum) has been detected as a
+forgery; nor do I know that Shakespeare&rsquo;s not specially
+mentioning his books proves that he had none.&nbsp; Lawyers
+appear to differ as to this inference: both Mr. Elton and Mr.
+Greenwood seem equally confident. <a name="citation175b"></a><a
+href="#footnote175b" class="citation">[175b]</a>&nbsp; But if <a
+name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 176</span>it were
+perfectly natural that the actor, Shakspere, should have no
+books, then he certainly made no effort, by the local colour of
+owning a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he <i>was</i> the
+author.&nbsp; Yet they believed that he was&mdash;really there is
+no wriggling out of it.&nbsp; As regards any of his own MSS.
+which Shakespeare may have had (one would expect them to be at
+his theatre), and their monetary value, if they were not, as
+usual, the property of his company, and of him as a member
+thereof, we can discuss that question in the section headed
+&ldquo;The First Folio.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It appears that Shakespeare&rsquo;s daughter, Judith, could
+write no more than her grandfather. <a name="citation176a"></a><a
+href="#footnote176a" class="citation">[176a]</a>&nbsp; Nor, I
+repeat, could the Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of the great Earl of
+Huntly, when she was married to the Earl of Bothwell in
+1566.&nbsp; At all events, Lady Jane &ldquo;made her
+mark.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may be feared that Judith, brought up in
+that very illiterate town of Stratford, under an illiterate
+mother, was neglected in her education.&nbsp; Sad, but very
+common in women of her rank, and scarcely a proof that her father
+did not write the plays.</p>
+<p>As &ldquo;nothing is known of the disposition and
+character&rdquo; <a name="citation176b"></a><a
+href="#footnote176b" class="citation">[176b]</a> of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, who died in
+1670, it is not so paralysingly strange that nothing is known of
+any relics or anecdotes of Shakespeare which she may have
+possessed.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood &ldquo;would <a
+name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 177</span>have
+supposed that she would have had much to say about the great
+poet,&rdquo; exhibited his books (if any), and so forth.&nbsp;
+Perhaps she did,&mdash;but how, if we &ldquo;know nothing about
+her disposition and character,&rdquo; can we tell?&nbsp; No
+interviewers rushed to her house (Abington Hall,
+Northampton-shire) with pencils and notebooks to record her
+utterances; no reporter interviewed her for the press.&nbsp; It
+is surprising, is it not?</p>
+<p>The inference might be drawn, in the Baconian manner, that,
+during the Commonwealth and Restoration, &ldquo;the friends of
+the Muses&rdquo; knew that the actor was <i>not</i> the author,
+and therefore did not interview his granddaughter in the
+country.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But, at any rate, we have the Stratford
+monument,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, and delves into this
+problem.&nbsp; Even the Stratford monument of Shakespeare in the
+parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries.&nbsp; If the
+gentle reader will throw his eye over the photograph <a
+name="citation177a"></a><a href="#footnote177a"
+class="citation">[177a]</a> of the monument as it now exists, he
+may not be able to say to the face of the poet&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Thou wast that all to me, Will,<br />
+For which my soul did pine.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But if he has any knowledge of Jacobean busts on monuments, he
+will probably agree with me in saying, &ldquo;This effigy, though
+executed by somebody who was not a Pheidias, and who perhaps
+worked merely from descriptions, is, at <a
+name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>all events,
+Jacobean.&rdquo;&nbsp; The same may assuredly be said of the
+monument; it is in good Jacobean style: the pillars with their
+capitals are graceful: all the rest is in keeping; and the two
+inscriptions are in the square capital letters of inscriptions of
+the period; not in italic characters.&nbsp; Distrusting my own
+<i>expertise</i>, I have consulted Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr.
+Holmes of the National Portrait Gallery.&nbsp; They, with Mr.
+Spielmann, think the work to be of the early seventeenth
+century.</p>
+<p>Next, glance at the figure opposite.&nbsp; This is a
+reproduction of &ldquo;the earliest representation of the
+Bust&rdquo; (and monument) in Dugdale&rsquo;s <i>Antiquities of
+Warwickshire</i> (1656).&nbsp; Compare the two objects, point by
+point, from the potato on top with holes in it, of Dugdale, which
+is meant for a skull, through all the details,&mdash;bust and
+all.&nbsp; Does Dugdale&rsquo;s print, whether engraved by Hollar
+or not, represent a Jacobean work?&nbsp; Look at the two
+ludicrous children, their legs dangling in air; at the
+lions&rsquo; heads above the capitals of the pillars; at the
+lettering of the two visible words of the inscription, and at the
+gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping a cushion to his
+abdomen.&nbsp; That hideous design was not executed by an artist
+who &ldquo;had his eye on the object,&rdquo; if the object were a
+Jacobean monument: while the actual monument was fashioned in no
+period of art but the Jacobean.&nbsp; From Digges&rsquo; rhymes
+in the Folio of 1623, we know that Shakespeare already had <a
+name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 179</span>his
+&ldquo;Stratford monument.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>The existing object is
+what he had</i>; the monument in Dugdale is what, I hope, no
+architect of 1616&ndash;23 could have imagined or designed.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p178b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Monument in Dugdale&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of the
+Antiquities of Warwickshire&rdquo; (1656)  (By permission of John
+Murray, Esq.)"
+title=
+"The Monument in Dugdale&rsquo;s &ldquo;History of the
+Antiquities of Warwickshire&rdquo; (1656)  (By permission of John
+Murray, Esq.)"
+ src="images/p178s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving is not a correct copy of any genuine
+Jacobean work of art.&nbsp; Is Dugdale accurate in his
+reproductions of other monuments in Stratford Church?&nbsp; To
+satisfy himself on this point, Sir George Trevelyan, as he wrote
+to me (June 13, 1912), &ldquo;made a sketch of the Carew
+Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and found that the
+discrepancies between the original tomb and the representation in
+Dugdale&rsquo;s <i>Warwickshire</i> are far and away greater than
+in the monument to William Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation179a"></a><a
+href="#footnote179a" class="citation">[179a]</a> while justly
+observing that &ldquo;the little sitting figures . . . are placed
+as no monumental sculptor would place them,&rdquo; &ldquo;on the
+whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale&rsquo;s figure . . .&nbsp; It is impossible
+to suppose that Hollar would have drawn and that Dugdale would
+have published a mere travesty of the Stratford
+Monument.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I do not know who drew the design, but a travesty of Jacobean
+work it is in every detail of the monument.&nbsp; A travesty is
+what Dugdale gives as a representation of the Carew
+monument.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, elsewhere, repeating his criticism
+of the impossible figures of children, says: &ldquo;This <a
+name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 180</span>is
+certainly mere matter of detail, and, in the absence of other
+evidence, would give us no warrant for doubting the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale&rsquo;s presentment of the
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; bust.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation180a"></a><a href="#footnote180a"
+class="citation">[180a]</a></p>
+<p>Why are we to believe that Dugdale&rsquo;s artist was merely
+fantastic in his design of the children (and also remote from
+Jacobean taste in every detail), and yet to credit him with
+&ldquo;substantial accuracy&rdquo; in his half-length of a gloomy
+creature clutching a cushion to his stomach?&nbsp; With his
+inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept him
+as accurate in his representation of the bust?&nbsp; Moreover,
+other evidence is not wanting.&nbsp; It is positively certain
+that the monument existing in 1748, was then known as &ldquo;the
+original monument,&rdquo; and that no other monument was put in
+its place, at that date or later.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p180b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Carew Monument in Stratford Church"
+title=
+"The Carew Monument in Stratford Church"
+ src="images/p180s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p181b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Carew Monument as Represented in Dugdale&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;History of the Antiquities of Warwickshire&rdquo; (1656)"
+title=
+"The Carew Monument as Represented in Dugdale&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;History of the Antiquities of Warwickshire&rdquo; (1656)"
+ src="images/p181s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Now Mrs. Stopes <a name="citation180b"></a><a
+href="#footnote180b" class="citation">[180b]</a> argues that in
+1748 the monument was &ldquo;entirely reconstructed,&rdquo; and
+so must have become no longer what Dugdale&rsquo;s man drew, but
+what we see to-day.&nbsp; It is positively certain that her
+opinion is erroneous.</p>
+<p>If ever what we see to-day was substituted for anything like
+what Dugdale&rsquo;s man drew, the date of the substitution is
+unknown.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove
+her theory.&nbsp; They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who
+quotes an unnamed &ldquo;contemporary account.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation181a"></a><a href="#footnote181a"
+class="citation">[181a]</a>&nbsp; <a name="page181"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 181</span>This account Mrs. Stopes, with her
+tireless industry, found in the Wheler manuscripts, among papers
+of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master of the Grammar
+School.&nbsp; In one paper of September 1740 &ldquo;the original
+monument&rdquo; is said to be &ldquo;much impaired and
+decayed.&rdquo;&nbsp; There was a scheme for making &ldquo;a new
+monument&rdquo; in Westminster Abbey.&nbsp; <i>That</i>, I
+venture to think, would have been in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean
+taste and style.&nbsp; But there was no money for a new
+monument.&nbsp; Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of November 20,
+1748, showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather of
+Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with &ldquo;a cry of
+players.&rdquo;&nbsp; He devoted the proceeds of a performance of
+<i>Othello</i> to the reparation of the then existing
+monument.&nbsp; The amount was twelve pounds ten shillings.&nbsp;
+The affair dragged on, one of the Church-wardens, a blacksmith,
+held the &pound;12, 10<i>s.</i>, and was troublesome.&nbsp; The
+document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was
+not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in
+the matter.&nbsp; It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or
+painter, is to &ldquo;take care, according to his ability, that
+the monument shall become as like as possible to what it was when
+first erected.&rdquo;&nbsp; This appears to have been the idea of
+Mr. Greene.&nbsp; Another form of words was later adopted,
+directing Mr. Hall, the painter, <a name="page182"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 182</span>&ldquo;to repair and beautify, or to
+have the direction of repairing and beautifying, <i>the original
+monument</i> of Shakespeare the poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mrs. Stopes
+infers, justly in my opinion, that Hall &ldquo;would fill up the
+gaps, restore what was amissing as he thought it ought to be, and
+finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of
+which he might still be able to see.&rdquo;&nbsp; In his
+<i>History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon</i>, <a
+name="citation182a"></a><a href="#footnote182a"
+class="citation">[182a]</a> Mr. Wheler tells us that this was
+what Hall did.&nbsp; &ldquo;In the year 1748 the monument was
+carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust,
+&amp;c., as much as possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner,
+of Stratford.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the
+painting is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793
+&ldquo;painted in white,&rdquo; to please Malone.&nbsp; It was
+repainted in 1861.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told
+to do, and what, according to Wheler, he did.&nbsp; She writes:
+&ldquo;It would only be giving good value for his money&rdquo;
+(&pound;12, 10<i>s.</i>) &ldquo;to his churchwardens if Hall
+added (<i>sic</i>) a cloak, a pen, and manuscript.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He &ldquo;could not help changing&rdquo; the face, and so on.</p>
+<p>Now it was physically impossible to <i>add</i> a cloak, a pen,
+and manuscript to such a stone bust as Dugdale&rsquo;s man shows;
+to take away the cushion pressed to the stomach, and to alter the
+head.&nbsp; Mr. Hall, if he was to give us the present bust, <a
+name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 183</span>had to make
+an entirely new bust, and, to give us the present monument in
+place of that shown in Dugdale&rsquo;s print, had to construct an
+entirely new monument.&nbsp; Now Hall was a painter, not (like
+Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor.&nbsp; <i>Pour tout
+potage</i> he had but &pound;12, 10<i>s.</i>&nbsp; He could not
+do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy &ldquo;the
+original monument&rdquo; and make a new monument in Jacobean
+style.&nbsp; He was straitly ordered to &ldquo;repair and
+beautify the original monument&rdquo;; he did repair it, and
+repainted the colours.&nbsp; That is all.&nbsp; I do not quote
+what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us <a name="citation183a"></a><a
+href="#footnote183a" class="citation">[183a]</a> about the
+repairing of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the
+pen; work which, he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of
+Oxford in 1790.&nbsp; He gives no authority, and Baconians may
+say that he was hoaxed, or &ldquo;lied with
+circumstance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation183b"></a><a
+href="#footnote183b" class="citation">[183b]</a> quotes
+Halliwell-Phillipps&rsquo;s <i>Works of Shakespeare</i> (1853),
+in which he says that the design in Dugdale&rsquo;s book
+&ldquo;is evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the
+probability being that it was not taken from the monument
+itself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Indeed the designer is so inaccurate that he
+gives the first word of the Latin inscription as
+&ldquo;Judicyo,&rdquo; just as Oudry blunders in the Latin
+inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied
+badly.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a name="page184"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 184</span>proceeds: &ldquo;In his
+<i>Outlines</i> Halliwell simply ignores Dugdale.&nbsp; His
+engraving was doubtless too inconvenient to be brought to public
+notice!&rdquo;&nbsp; Here Halliwell is accused of suppressing the
+truth; if he invented his minute details about the repeated
+reparation of the writing hand,&mdash;not represented in
+Dugdale&rsquo;s design,&mdash;he also lied with
+circumstance.&nbsp; But he certainly quoted a genuine
+&ldquo;contemporary account&rdquo; of the orders for repairing
+and beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that
+he also had records for what he says about reparations of the
+hand and pen.&nbsp; He speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed
+alabaster parts of the monument, though not in his
+<i>Outlines</i>; and I observe that, in Mrs. Stopes&rsquo;s
+papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748, at
+which mention was made of &ldquo;the materials&rdquo; which Hall
+was to use for repairs.</p>
+<p>To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both
+monument and bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date
+(1616&ndash;23) and against the Georgian date of 1748, that I
+need no other evidence; nor do I suppose that any one familiar
+with the monumental style of 1590&ndash;1620 can be of a
+different opinion.&nbsp; In the same way I do not expect any
+artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in
+Rowe&rsquo;s <i>Shakespeare</i> (1709), and that by Grignion so
+late as 1786, for anything but copies of the design in Dugdale,
+with modifications made <i>&agrave; plaisir</i>.&nbsp; In <a
+name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+185</span>Pope&rsquo;s edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument
+with some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of
+the bust presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face
+borrowed from &ldquo;the Chandos portrait,&rdquo; which, in my
+opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait of
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; None of them, I conceive, was painted from the
+life.</p>
+<p>The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original
+bust, copied in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we
+need not waste words over this speculation.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+writes that &ldquo;if I should be told that Dugdale&rsquo;s
+effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring an exceptionally
+bad harvest, &lsquo;I should not feel it to be
+strange!&rsquo;&nbsp; Neither should I feel it at all strange if
+I were told that it was the presentment of a philosopher and Lord
+Chancellor, who had fallen from high estate and recognised that
+all things are but vanity.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p185b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"From Vertue&rsquo;s Engraving of the Monument (1725)  (By
+permission of John Murray, Esq.)"
+title=
+"From Vertue&rsquo;s Engraving of the Monument (1725)  (By
+permission of John Murray, Esq.)"
+ src="images/p185s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>I</i> should not feel it to be strange&rdquo; if a
+Baconian told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were
+placed in the monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on
+asking why the alteration was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s words, &ldquo;Was Dugdale&rsquo;s bust thought
+to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of
+Stratford?&nbsp; Or was it thought that the presence of a
+woolsack&rdquo; (the cushion) &ldquo;might be taken as indicating
+that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support <a
+name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 186</span>to a
+certain Lord Chancellor?&rdquo; <a name="citation186a"></a><a
+href="#footnote186a" class="citation">[186a]</a>&nbsp; Such,
+indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say,
+I believe.</p>
+<p>Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving reproduces the first words of a
+Latin inscription, still on the monument:</p>
+<blockquote><p><i>Judicio Pylium</i>, <i>genio Socratem</i>,
+<i>arte Maronem</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Terra tegit</i>, <i>populus m&aelig;ret</i>,
+<i>Olympus habet</i>:</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&ldquo;Earth covers, Olympus&rdquo; (heaven? or the
+Muses&rsquo; Hill?) &ldquo;holds him who was a Nestor in counsel;
+in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his D&aelig;mon&rdquo;
+(&ldquo;Genius&rdquo;).&nbsp; As for the &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; or
+d&aelig;mon of Socrates, and the permitted false quantity in
+making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the use of
+<i>Olympus</i> for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to
+consult the learning of Mr. Elton. <a name="citation186b"></a><a
+href="#footnote186b" class="citation">[186b]</a>&nbsp; The poet
+who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause
+to object to another on his monument.&nbsp; We do not know who
+erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted
+the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or
+Bacon?) &ldquo;a clayver man.&rdquo;&nbsp; The monument (if a
+trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably
+erected by the piety of Shakespeare&rsquo;s daughter and
+son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall.&nbsp; They exhibit a taste for the
+mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Hall gratified <a name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+187</span>the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with
+one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. <a
+name="citation187a"></a><a href="#footnote187a"
+class="citation">[187a]</a>&nbsp; It opens like an epigram in the
+Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian
+mysticism.&nbsp; Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for
+himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.</p>
+<p>The famous &ldquo;Good friend for Jesus&rsquo; sake
+forbear,&rdquo; and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath
+which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first
+of &ldquo;the last lines written, we are told,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation187b"></a><a href="#footnote187b"
+class="citation">[187b]</a> &ldquo;by the author of
+<i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote
+the four lines of doggerel?&nbsp; Is it conceivable that the
+authority for Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorship of the doggerel is a
+tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen&rsquo;s in 1693, from a
+parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says,&mdash;criticism makes
+the clerk twenty years younger. <a name="citation187c"></a><a
+href="#footnote187c" class="citation">[187c]</a>&nbsp; For
+Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William
+Shakspere of Stratford.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will&rsquo;s daughter, Mrs. Hall,
+died, her epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father&rsquo;s
+intelligence.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Witty above her sex, but that&rsquo;s not
+all,<br />
+Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,<br />
+Something of Shakespeare was in <i>that</i>, but <i>this</i><br
+/>
+Wholly of Him with whom she&rsquo;s now in bliss.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation187d"></a><a href="#footnote187d"
+class="citation">[187d]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+188</span>Thirty-three years after Shakespeare&rsquo;s death he
+was still thought &ldquo;witty&rdquo; in Stratford.&nbsp; But
+what could Stratford know?&nbsp; Milton and Charles I were of the
+same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation
+after Shakespeare.&nbsp; But they did not know, how should they,
+that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the
+plays and poems.&nbsp; The secret, perhaps, so widely spread
+among &ldquo;the friends of the Muses&rdquo; in 1616, was
+singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a
+general rule.</p>
+<p>I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will,
+which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic
+suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he
+&ldquo;died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against
+any man who might <i>move his bones</i>?&nbsp; A mean and vulgar
+curse indeed!&rdquo; <a name="citation188a"></a><a
+href="#footnote188a" class="citation">[188a]</a>&nbsp; And the
+authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and
+vulgar curse upon his lips?</p>
+<p>About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years
+almost after Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, W. Hall, a Queen&rsquo;s
+man, Oxford (the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine
+Ovid, with Shakespeare&rsquo;s signature, true or forged, to its
+unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage
+to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Mr.
+Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean
+and vulgar curse.&nbsp; He adds that there was a <a
+name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 189</span>great
+ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up
+were piled, &ldquo;they would load a great number of
+waggons.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare
+wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and sextons,
+&ldquo;for the most part a very ignorant sort of
+people.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>If Shakespeare <i>did</i>, that accommodation of himself to
+his audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. <a
+name="citation189a"></a><a href="#footnote189a"
+class="citation">[189a]</a>&nbsp; Of course there is no evidence
+that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the
+pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.</p>
+<p>Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I
+cannot enter.&nbsp; Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to
+the First Folio, but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to
+give the Folio &ldquo;a good send-off.&rdquo;&nbsp; The engraving
+is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if
+from any, it was executed.&nbsp; Richard Burbage is known to have
+amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand
+on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor.&nbsp; If so, he
+may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart&rsquo;s
+embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her
+Majesty.</p>
+<p>That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while
+Shakespeare, as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with
+the authorship <a name="page190"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+190</span>of the plays.&nbsp; Ben was a scholar, the darling of
+both Universities; constantly employed about the Court in
+arranging Masques; his learning and his Scottish blood may have
+led James I to notice him.&nbsp; Ben, in his later years, was
+much in society; fashionable and literary.&nbsp; He was the
+father of the literary &ldquo;tribe of Ben.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus he
+naturally sat for his portrait.&nbsp; In the same way George
+Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox.&nbsp; But
+as a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as
+tutor of his King, and was the &ldquo;good pen&rdquo; of the
+anti-Marian nobles, Murray, Morton, and the rest.&nbsp; Therefore
+Buchanan&rsquo;s portrait was painted, while of Knox we have only
+a woodcut, done, apparently, after his death, from descriptions,
+for Beza&rsquo;s <i>Icones</i>.&nbsp; The Folio engraving may
+have no better source.&nbsp; Without much minute research it is
+hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and, just as in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s case, <a name="citation190a"></a><a
+href="#footnote190a" class="citation">[190a]</a> the market, in
+her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded with
+&ldquo;mock-originals,&rdquo; not even derived (in any case known
+to me) from genuine and authentic contemporary works.</p>
+<p>One thing is certain about the Stratford bust.&nbsp; Baconians
+will believe that Dugdale&rsquo;s man correctly represented the
+bust as it was in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748,
+in spite of proofs of Dugdale&rsquo;s man&rsquo;s fantastic
+inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of style; and in spite of <a
+name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 191</span>documentary
+evidence that &ldquo;the original monument&rdquo; was not to be
+destroyed and replaced by the actual monument, but was merely
+&ldquo;repaired and beautified&rdquo; (painted afresh) by a local
+painter.</p>
+<h2><a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 193</span>X<br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">&ldquo;THE TRADITIONAL
+SHAKSPERE&rdquo;</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> perusing the copious arguments
+of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non-Baconian Mr. Greenwood, I am
+often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to address him thus: Best of
+men, let me implore you, first, to keep in memory these
+statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly
+insisted, namely, that society in Stratford was not only not
+literary, but was illiterate.&nbsp; Next pardon me for asking you
+to remember that the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth
+century did not resemble our fortunate age.&nbsp; Some people
+read Shakespeare&rsquo;s, Beaumont&rsquo;s, and Fletcher&rsquo;s
+plays.&nbsp; This exercise is now very rarely practised.&nbsp;
+But nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private
+lives and personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan
+and Jacobean playwrights, in the modern manner.&nbsp; Of
+Shakespeare (pardon, I mean Shakspere), the actor, there is one
+contemporary anecdote, in my poor opinion a baseless
+waggery.&nbsp; Of Beaumont there is none.&nbsp; Of a hand-maid of
+Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at
+the end of the seventeenth century,&mdash;nothing better.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile of Shakspere the &ldquo;traditions&rdquo; must be
+sought <a name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+196</span>either at Stratford or in connection with the London
+Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand
+very late.</p>
+<p>As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate,
+any traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been
+literary.&nbsp; That is absolutely certain.&nbsp; Natives at
+Stratford had, by your own hypothesis, scant interest in literary
+anecdote.&nbsp; Fifty years after Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, no
+native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit (though
+it was remembered in 1649, that he was &ldquo;witty&rdquo;), or
+any &ldquo;wood-notes wild,&rdquo; which he may have displayed or
+chirped at an early age.</p>
+<p>Such things were of no interest to Stratford.&nbsp; If he made
+a speech when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town,
+the circumstance might descend from one gaffer to another; he
+might even be remembered as &ldquo;the best of his
+family,&rdquo;&mdash;the least inefficient.&nbsp; Given your
+non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect nothing
+more, and nothing better, than we receive.</p>
+<p>Let me illustrate by a modern example.&nbsp; In 1866 I was an
+undergraduate of a year&rsquo;s standing at Balliol College,
+Oxford, certainly not an unlettered academy.&nbsp; In that year,
+the early and the best poems of a considerable Balliol poet were
+published: he had &ldquo;gone down&rdquo; some eight years
+before.&nbsp; Being young and green I eagerly sought for
+traditions about Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp; One <a
+name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 197</span>of his
+contemporaries, who took a First in the final Classical Schools,
+told me that &ldquo;he was a smug.&rdquo;&nbsp; Another, that, as
+Mr. Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch professor) were not
+cricketers, they proposed that they should combine to pay but a
+single subscription to the Cricket Club.&nbsp; A third, a tutor
+of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician, merely
+smiled at my early enthusiasm,&mdash;and told me nothing.&nbsp; A
+white-haired College servant said that &ldquo;Mr. Swinburne was a
+very quiet gentleman.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to
+eighty years after Shakspere&rsquo;s death,&mdash;a Civil War and
+the Reign of the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having
+intervened,&mdash;and ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of
+Shakspere&rsquo;s early brilliance, a century before, survived at
+Stratford.</p>
+<p>A very humble parallel may follow.&nbsp; Some foolish person
+went seeking early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk
+on the Ettrick.&nbsp; From an intelligent townsman he gathered
+much that was true and interesting about my younger brothers, who
+delighted in horses and dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and
+played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucestershire and
+Oxford.&nbsp; But about me the inquiring literary snipe only
+heard that &ldquo;Andra was aye the stupid ane o&rsquo; the
+fam&rsquo;ly.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local
+club, <i>non sine gloria</i>!&nbsp; Even <i>that</i> was
+forgotten.</p>
+<p>Try to remember, best of men, that literary <a
+name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 198</span>anecdotes
+of a fellow townsman&rsquo;s youth do not dwell in the memories
+of his neighbours from sixty to a hundred years after date.&nbsp;
+It is not in human nature that what was incomprehensible to the
+grandsire should be remembered by the grandson.&nbsp; Go to
+&ldquo;Thrums&rdquo; and ask for literary memories of the youth
+of Mr. Barrie.</p>
+<p>Yet <a name="citation198a"></a><a href="#footnote198a"
+class="citation">[198a]</a> the learned Malone seems to have been
+sorry that little of Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the
+poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink taken
+(<i>where</i>, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered,
+so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant
+places.&nbsp; Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton
+and Ben?&nbsp; Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in
+a peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant <i>bourgade</i>,
+where, however, the &ldquo;wit&rdquo; of Shakespeare was not
+forgotten (in the family) in 1649.&nbsp; See the epithet on the
+tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.</p>
+<p>You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford
+(1661&ndash;3), who has heard that the actor was &ldquo;a natural
+wit,&rdquo; and contracted and died of a fever, after a bout with
+Drayton and Ben.&nbsp; I can scarcely believe that <i>these</i>
+were local traditions.&nbsp; How could these <i>rustauds</i> have
+an opinion about &ldquo;natural wit,&rdquo; how could they have
+known the names of Ben and Drayton?</p>
+<p>When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, you neglect <a
+name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 199</span>to trace
+the steps in the descent of his tradition.&nbsp; As has been
+stated, Beeston, &ldquo;the chronicle of the Stage&rdquo; (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.&nbsp; The
+story of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare &ldquo;knowing
+Latin pretty well,&rdquo; is of no value to me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+the story does not suit you, and you call it &ldquo;a mere
+myth,&rdquo; which, &ldquo;of course, will be believed by those
+who wish to believe it.&rdquo;&nbsp; But, most excellent of
+mortals, will it not, by parity of reasoning, &ldquo;of course be
+disbelieved by those who do <i>not</i> wish to believe
+it&rdquo;?</p>
+<p>And do you want to believe it?</p>
+<p>To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent
+instructor of younger players, you refer slightingly.&nbsp; They
+do not weigh with me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere
+(or Shakespeare) best in stage affairs.&nbsp; In reference to a
+very elliptic statement that, &ldquo;in <i>Hamlet</i> Betterton
+benefited by Shakespeare&rsquo;s coaching,&rdquo; you write,
+&ldquo;This is astonishing, seeing that Shakspere had been in his
+grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born.&nbsp; The
+explanation is that Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, was,
+according to Sir William Davenant, <a name="page200"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 200</span>instructed by Shakspere, and
+Davenant, who had seen Taylor act, according to Downes,
+instructed Betterton.&nbsp; There is a similar story about
+Betterton playing King Henry VIII.&nbsp; Betterton was said to
+have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed by Lowen,
+who was instructed by Shakspere!&rdquo; <a
+name="citation200a"></a><a href="#footnote200a"
+class="citation">[200a]</a></p>
+<p>Why a note of exclamation?&nbsp; Who was Downes, and what were
+his opportunities of acquiring information?&nbsp; He &ldquo;was
+for many years book-keeper in the Duke&rsquo;s Company, first
+under Davenant in the old house . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; Davenant was
+notoriously the main link between &ldquo;the first and second
+Temple,&rdquo; the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as a boy, he
+knew, and the Restoration theatre.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; As his Book-keeper with the Duke of
+York&rsquo;s Company, Downes heard what Davenant had to tell; he
+also, for his <i>Roscius Anglicanus</i>, had notes from Charles
+Booth, prompter at Drury Lane.&nbsp; On May 28, 1663, Davenant
+reproduced <i>Hamlet</i>, with young Betterton as the Prince of
+Denmark.&nbsp; Davenant, says Charles Booth, &ldquo;had seen the
+part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor had
+been instructed by the author,&rdquo; (not Bacon but) &ldquo;Mr.
+William Shakespeare,&rdquo; <a name="page201"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 201</span>and Davenant &ldquo;taught Mr.
+Betterton in every particle of it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Elton adds,
+&ldquo;We cannot be sure that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare
+himself.&nbsp; He is believed to have been a member of the
+King&rsquo;s Company before 1613, and to have left it for a time
+before Shakespeare&rsquo;s death.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation201a"></a><a href="#footnote201a"
+class="citation">[201a]</a>&nbsp; His name is in the list in the
+Folio of &ldquo;the principall Actors in all these plays,&rdquo;
+but I cannot pretend to be certain that he played in them in
+Will&rsquo;s time.</p>
+<p>It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles
+Davenant&rsquo;s splendid revival of <i>Henry VIII</i>, in which
+Betterton, as the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant,
+who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction
+&ldquo;from Mr. Shakespear himself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Lowin, or Lowen,
+joined Shakespeare&rsquo;s Company in 1604, being then a man of
+twenty-eight.&nbsp; Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet and
+Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have
+&ldquo;understudies.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.</p>
+<p>When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the
+additions to his notes made about 1690&ndash;1708, we are
+concerned with evidence much too remote, and, in your own
+classical style, &ldquo;all this is just a little mixed.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation201b"></a><a href="#footnote201b"
+class="citation">[201b]</a>&nbsp; <a name="page202"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 202</span>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.&nbsp;
+I do not habitually believe in what I hear from &ldquo;the oldest
+aunt telling the saddest tale,&rdquo;&mdash;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,&mdash;the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her
+Majesty in the bloom of girlhood.&nbsp; Nor do I care for what
+Rowe said (on Betterton&rsquo;s information), in 1709, about
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall said
+that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes
+(Menzies?) said.&nbsp; But I do care for what Ben Jonson and
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s fellow-actors said; and for what his literary
+contemporaries have left on record.&nbsp; But this evidence you
+explain away by &aelig;tiological guesses, absolutely modern,
+and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not
+more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.</p>
+<p>What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died,
+was men&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Men also had <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,
+<i>Lucrece</i>, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do
+not wonder at it.&nbsp; Of the genius of Shakespeare England
+could form no conception, till the <a name="page203"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 203</span>publication of the Folio (1623), not
+in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in
+1664.&nbsp; The <i>engouement</i> about the poet, the search for
+personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till
+nearly thirty years after 1664&mdash;and we are to wonder that
+the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition,
+are so scanty and so valueless.&nbsp; What could have been picked
+up, by 1680&ndash;90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts
+of Law, I wonder.</p>
+<h2><a name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+205</span>XI<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE FIRST FOLIO</span></h2>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">The</span> First Folio&rdquo; is
+the name commonly given to the first collected edition of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The book has been microscopically examined by
+Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in
+italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere.&nbsp; Their
+various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the
+late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.</p>
+<p>The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays
+in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable.&nbsp; The
+title-page says that <i>all</i> the contents are published
+&ldquo;according to the true original copies.&rdquo;&nbsp; If
+<i>only</i> MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases
+the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by
+MSS.&nbsp; The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson
+wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), <a
+name="citation207a"></a><a href="#footnote207a"
+class="citation">[207a]</a> speaking in the name of the two
+actors who sign it.&nbsp; They say that Shakespeare&rsquo;s <a
+name="page208"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 208</span>friends
+&ldquo;have collected and published&rdquo; the plays, have so
+published them &ldquo;that whereas you were abus&rsquo;d with
+divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by
+the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed
+them: <i>even those</i>&rdquo; (namely, the pieces previously
+ill-produced by pirates) &ldquo;are now offered to your view
+cur&rsquo;d, and perfect of their limbes; and <i>all the
+rest</i>&rdquo; (that is, all the plays which had not been
+piratically debased), &ldquo;absolute in their numbers, as he
+conceived them.&rdquo;&nbsp; So obscure is the Preface that not
+<i>all</i> previously published separate plays are explicitly
+said to be stolen and deformed, but &ldquo;<i>divers</i> stolen
+copies&rdquo; are denounced.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard makes the same
+point in <i>Shakespeare Folios and Quartos</i>, p. 2 (1909).</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; Some quartos, like that of <i>Hamlet</i>
+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&rsquo;s Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the
+question.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain,
+that &ldquo;we have strong <i>prima facie</i> evidence that the
+sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the
+Stationers&rsquo; Registers was regulated by their lawful
+owners.&rdquo; <a name="citation208a"></a><a href="#footnote208a"
+class="citation">[208a]</a></p>
+<p><a name="page209"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 209</span>The
+Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately
+printed texts were good, but says that &ldquo;divers&rdquo; of
+them were stolen and deformed.&nbsp; My view of the meaning of
+the Preface is not generally held.&nbsp; Dr. H. H. Furness, in
+his preface to <i>Much Ado about Nothing</i> (p. vi), says,
+&ldquo;We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare assert
+in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the
+Author&rsquo;s manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the
+Quartos as stolen and surreptitious.&rdquo;&nbsp; I cannot see, I
+repeat, that the Preface denounces <i>all</i> the Quartos.&nbsp;
+It could be truly said that <i>divers</i> stolen and maimed
+copies had been foisted on &ldquo;abused&rdquo; purchasers, and
+really no more <i>is</i> said.&nbsp; Dr. Furness writes,
+&ldquo;When we now find them using as &lsquo;copy&rsquo; one of
+these very Quartos&rdquo; (<i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>, 1600),
+&ldquo;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 . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; That <i>was</i> their
+meaning, I think, the Quarto of <i>Much Ado</i> had <i>not</i>
+been &ldquo;maimed&rdquo; and &ldquo;deformed,&rdquo; as divers
+other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.</p>
+<p>Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member
+of his Company.&nbsp; I presume that his play was thus the common
+good of his Company and himself.&nbsp; If they sold a copy to the
+press, the price would go into their <a name="page210"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 210</span>common stock; unless they, in good
+will, allowed the author to pocket the money.</p>
+<p>It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface
+otherwise than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge
+edition.&nbsp; They write, &ldquo;The natural inference to be
+drawn from this statement&rdquo; (in the Preface) &ldquo;is that
+<i>all</i> the separate editions of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays
+were &lsquo;stolen,&rsquo; &lsquo;surreptitious&rsquo; and
+imperfect, <i>and that all those published in the Folio were
+printed from the author&rsquo;s own manuscripts</i>&rdquo; (my
+italics).&nbsp; The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr.
+Pollard, whose learned opinion coincides with my own.</p>
+<p>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&rsquo;s valuable book, based on the
+widest and most minute research, came into my hands.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;and were honestly obtained.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation210a"></a><a href="#footnote210a"
+class="citation">[210a]</a>&nbsp; The Preface never denies this;
+never says that all the quartos contain maimed and disfigured
+texts.&nbsp; The Preface draws a distinction to this effect,
+&ldquo;even those&rdquo; (even the stolen and deformed copies)
+&ldquo;are now cured and perfect in their
+limbs,&rdquo;&mdash;that is, have been carefully edited, while
+&ldquo;<i>all the rest</i>&rdquo; are &ldquo;absolute in their
+numbers as he conceived them.&rdquo;&nbsp; This <a
+name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 211</span>does not
+allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare&rsquo;s own
+holograph copies.</p>
+<p>Among the plays spoken of as &ldquo;all the rest,&rdquo;
+namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the
+fraudulent, are, <i>Tempest</i>, <i>Two Gentlemen</i>, <i>Measure
+for Measure</i>, <i>Comedy of Errors</i>, <i>As You Like It</i>,
+<i>All&rsquo;s Well</i>, <i>Twelfth Night</i>, <i>Winter&rsquo;s
+Tale</i>, <i>Henry VI</i>, iii., <i>Henry VIII</i>,
+<i>Coriolanus</i>, <i>Timon</i>, <i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i>,
+<i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i>, and
+<i>Cymbeline</i>.&nbsp; Also <i>Henry VI</i>, i., ii., <i>King
+John</i>, and <i>Taming of the Shrew</i>, appeared now in other
+form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or
+closely similar names.&nbsp; We have, moreover, no previous
+information as to <i>The Shrew</i>, <i>Timon</i>, <i>Julius
+C&aelig;sar</i>, <i>All&rsquo;s Well</i>, and <i>Henry
+VIII</i>.&nbsp; The Preface adds the remarkable statement that,
+whatever Shakespeare thought, &ldquo;he uttered with that
+easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his
+papers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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.&nbsp; The Preface takes it
+for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays
+&ldquo;absolute in their numbers as he conceived
+them.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the Preface does not commit itself, I
+repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed
+from Shakespeare&rsquo;s own handwriting.&nbsp; After &ldquo;as
+he conceived them,&rdquo; it goes on, &ldquo;Who, as he was a
+most happy imitator of nature, was a <a name="page212"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 212</span>most gentle expresser of it.&nbsp;
+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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This may be meant to <i>suggest</i>, but does not
+<i>affirm</i>, that the actors <i>have</i> &ldquo;all the
+rest&rdquo; of the plays in Shakespeare&rsquo;s own
+handwriting.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is not possible to pin them down to any plain
+statement of facts concerning the sources for the hitherto
+unpublished plays, &ldquo;the rest&rdquo; of the plays.</p>
+<p>These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors
+thought accurate, and some may have been &ldquo;fair
+copies&rdquo; in Shakespeare&rsquo;s own hand. (Scott, as regards
+his novels, sent his <i>prima cura</i>, his first writing down,
+to the press, and his pages are nearly free from blot or
+erasion.&nbsp; In one case at least, Shelley&rsquo;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.)&nbsp; Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this
+Preface, in accordance with the wishes and instructions of the
+two actors <a name="page213"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+213</span>who sign it.&nbsp; He took their word for the almost
+blotless MSS. which they received from Shakespeare.&nbsp; He
+remarks, in his posthumously published <i>Discoveries</i> (notes,
+memories, brief essays), &ldquo;I remember the players have
+<i>often</i> mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in
+his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a
+line.&rdquo;&nbsp; And Ben gives, we shall later see, his
+habitual reply to this habitual boast.</p>
+<p>As to the sources of such plays as had been &ldquo;maimed and
+deformed by injurious impostors,&rdquo; and are now
+&ldquo;offered cur&rsquo;d and perfect of their limbs,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;it can be proved to demonstration,&rdquo; say the
+Cambridge Editors, &ldquo;that several plays in the Folio were
+printed from earlier quarto editions&rdquo; (but the players
+secured a retreat on this point), &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>Hamlet</i>, in the Folio of 1623, when
+it differs from the quarto of 1604, &ldquo;differs for the worse
+in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty
+places.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>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,&mdash;if the
+players did not lie in what they &ldquo;often said,&rdquo; and if
+they kept the originals,&mdash;out of some MSS. received from
+Shakspere?&nbsp; Whether the two players themselves threw into
+the press, after some hasty <a name="page214"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 214</span>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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The editing of the Folio
+is so exquisitely careless that twelve printer&rsquo;s errors in
+a quarto of 1622, of <i>Richard III</i>, appear in the Folio of
+1623.&nbsp; Again, the <i>Merry Wives</i> of the Folio, is nearly
+twice as long as the quarto of 1619, yet keeps old errors.</p>
+<p>How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also
+the large additions and improvements?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Did he, for the
+Folio of 1623, nearly double <i>The Merry Wives</i> in extent,
+and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto
+uncorrected?</p>
+<p>In that case how negligent was Bacon of his immortal
+works!&nbsp; Now Bacon was a scholar, and this absurd conduct
+cannot be imputed, I hope, to him.</p>
+<p>Mr. Pollard is much more lenient than his fellow-scholars
+towards the Editor or Editors of the Folio.&nbsp; He concludes
+that &ldquo;manuscript copies of the plays were easily
+procurable.&rdquo;&nbsp; Sixteen <a name="page215"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 215</span>out of the thirty-six plays existed
+in quartos.&nbsp; Eight of the sixteen were not used for the
+Folio; five were used, &ldquo;with additions, corrections, or
+alterations&rdquo; (which must have been made from
+manuscripts).&nbsp; Three quartos only were reprinted as they
+stood.&nbsp; 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. <a name="citation215a"></a><a
+href="#footnote215a" class="citation">[215a]</a>&nbsp; They did
+make an attempt to divide their plays into Acts and Scenes,
+whereas the quartos, as a general rule, had been undivided.&nbsp;
+But the Editors, I must say, had not the energy to carry out
+their good intentions fully&mdash;or Bacon or Bungay, if the
+author, wearied in well-doing.&nbsp; The work is least ill done
+in the Comedies, and grows worse and worse as the Editor, or
+Bacon, or Bungay becomes intolerably slack.</p>
+<p>A great living author, who had a decent regard for his own
+works, could never have made or passed this slovenly Folio.&nbsp;
+Yet Mr. Greenwood argues that probably Bungay was still alive and
+active, after Shakspere was dead and buried.&nbsp; (Mr.
+Greenwood, of course, does not speak of Bungay, which I use as
+short for his Great Unknown.)&nbsp; Thus, <i>Richard III</i> from
+1597 to 1622 appeared in six quartos.&nbsp; It is immensely
+improved in the Folio, and so are several other plays.&nbsp; Who
+made the improvements, which the <a name="page216"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 216</span>Editors could only obtain in
+manuscripts?&nbsp; If we say that Shakespeare made them in MS.,
+Mr. Greenwood asks, &ldquo;What had he to work upon, since, after
+selling his plays to his company, he did not preserve his
+manuscript?&rdquo; <a name="citation216a"></a><a
+href="#footnote216a" class="citation">[216a]</a>&nbsp; Now I do
+not know that he did sell his plays to his company.&nbsp; We are
+sure that Will got money for them, but we do not know what
+arrangement he made with his company.&nbsp; He may have had an
+author&rsquo;s rights in addition to a sum down, as later was
+customary, and he had his regular share in the profits.&nbsp; Nor
+am I possessed of information that &ldquo;he did not preserve his
+manuscript.&rdquo;&nbsp; How can we know that?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The <i>Richard III</i> of the Folio contains,
+with much new matter, the printer&rsquo;s errors of the quarto of
+1622.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s errors in the quarto.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood
+asks whether &ldquo;the natural conclusion is not that
+&lsquo;some person unknown&rsquo; took the Quarto of 1622,
+revised it, <a name="page217"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+217</span>added the new passages, and thus put it into the form
+in which it appeared in 1623.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; And so on in other plays similarly treated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Is it not a more natural conclusion that
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;&rdquo; (Bungay) &ldquo;himself revised
+its publication, and that some part of this revision, at any
+rate, was done after 1616 and before 1623.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation217a"></a><a href="#footnote217a"
+class="citation">[217a]</a></p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, <a
+name="citation217b"></a><a href="#footnote217b"
+class="citation">[217b]</a> &ldquo;There is, of course, another
+hypothesis.&nbsp; It is that Shakespeare&rdquo; (meaning the real
+author) &ldquo;did not die in 1616,&rdquo; and here follows the
+usual notion that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; was the &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>&rdquo; of that transcendent genius, &ldquo;moving in
+Court circles among the highest of his day (as assuredly
+Shakespeare must have moved)&mdash;who wished to conceal his
+identity.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I have not the shadow of assurance that the Author
+&ldquo;moved in Court circles,&rdquo; though Will would see a
+good deal when he played at Court, and in the houses of nobles,
+before &ldquo;Eliza and our James.&rdquo;&nbsp; I never moved in
+Court circles: Mr. Greenwood must know them better than I do, and
+I have explained (see <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>,
+and <i>Shakespeare</i>, <i>Genius</i>, <i>and Society</i>) how
+Will picked up his notions of courtly ways.</p>
+<p><a name="page218"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+218</span>&ldquo;Another hypothesis,&rdquo; the Baconian
+hypothesis,&mdash;&ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; and
+all,&mdash;Mr. Greenwood thinks &ldquo;an extremely reasonable
+one&rdquo;: I cannot easily conceive of one more
+unreasonable.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;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 &lsquo;literary
+man,&rsquo; to some &lsquo;good pen,&rsquo; who was at the time
+doing work for him; and why not to the man who wrote the
+commendatory verses, the &lsquo;Lines to the Reader&rsquo;&rdquo;
+(opposite to the engraving), &ldquo;and, as seems certain, the
+Preface, &lsquo;to the great variety of Readers&rsquo;?&rdquo; <a
+name="citation218a"></a><a href="#footnote218a"
+class="citation">[218a]</a></p>
+<p>That man, that &ldquo;good pen,&rdquo; was Ben Jonson.&nbsp;
+On the &ldquo;supposing&rdquo; of Mr. Greenwood, Ben is
+&ldquo;doing work for&rdquo; the Great Unknown at the time when
+&ldquo;the business&rdquo; following on the &ldquo;idea of
+publishing a collected edition of the plays which had been
+written under the name of Shakespeare&rdquo; occurred to the
+illustrious but unknown owner of that &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; In plain words of my own,&mdash;the
+Author may have entrusted &ldquo;the business,&rdquo; and what
+was that business if not the editing of the Folio?&mdash;to Ben
+Jonson&mdash;&ldquo;who was at the time doing work for
+him&rdquo;&mdash;for the Author.</p>
+<p>Here is a clue!&nbsp; We only need to know for <a
+name="page219"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 219</span>what man of
+&ldquo;transcendent genius, universal culture, world-wide
+philosophy . . . moving in Court circles,&rdquo; and so on, Ben
+&ldquo;was working&rdquo; about 1621&ndash;3, the Folio appearing
+in 1623.</p>
+<p>The heart beats with anticipation of a discovery!&nbsp;
+&ldquo;On January 22, 1621, Bacon celebrated his sixtieth
+birthday with great state at York House.&nbsp; Jonson was
+present,&rdquo; and wrote an ode, with something about the Genius
+of the House (<i>Lar</i> or Brownie),</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Thou stand&rsquo;st as if some mystery thou
+didst.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood does not know what this can mean; nor do I. <a
+name="citation219a"></a><a href="#footnote219a"
+class="citation">[219a]</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Jonson, it appears&rdquo; (on what authority?),
+&ldquo;was Bacon&rsquo;s guest at Gorhambury, and was one of
+those good &lsquo;pens,&rsquo;&rdquo; of whom Bacon speaks as
+assisting him in the translation of some of his books into
+Latin.</p>
+<p>Bacon, writing to Toby Mathew, June 26, 1623, mentions the
+help of &ldquo;some good pens,&rdquo; Ben Jonson he does not
+mention.&nbsp; But Judge Webb does.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is an
+undoubted fact,&rdquo; says Judge Webb, &ldquo;that the Latin of
+the <i>De Augmentis</i>, which was published in 1623, was the
+work of Jonson.&rdquo; <a name="citation219b"></a><a
+href="#footnote219b" class="citation">[219b]</a>&nbsp; To whom
+Mr. Collins replies, &ldquo;There is not a particle of evidence
+that Jonson gave to Bacon the smallest assistance in translating
+any of his works into Latin.&rdquo; <a name="citation219c"></a><a
+href="#footnote219c" class="citation">[219c]</a></p>
+<p><a name="page220"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+220</span><i>Tr&egrave;s bien</i>, on Judge Webb&rsquo;s
+assurance the person for whom Ben was working, in 1623, was
+Bacon.&nbsp; Meanwhile, Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;supposing&rdquo; is &ldquo;that there was such an
+author&rdquo; (of transcendent genius, and so on), who &ldquo;may
+have entrusted the editing of his collected plays&rdquo; to some
+&ldquo;good pen,&rdquo; who was at the time &ldquo;doing work for
+him,&rdquo; and &ldquo;why not to&rdquo;&mdash;Ben Jonson. <a
+name="citation220a"></a><a href="#footnote220a"
+class="citation">[220a]</a>&nbsp; Now the man for whom Ben, in
+1623, was &ldquo;doing work&rdquo;&mdash;was <span
+class="smcap">Bacon</span>,&mdash;so Judge Webb says. <a
+name="citation220b"></a><a href="#footnote220b"
+class="citation">[220b]</a></p>
+<p>Therefore, by this hypothesis of Mr. Greenwood, <a
+name="citation220c"></a><a href="#footnote220c"
+class="citation">[220c]</a> the Great Unknown was
+Bacon,&mdash;just the hypothesis of the common Baconian.</p>
+<p>Is my reasoning erroneous?&nbsp; Is the
+&ldquo;supposing&rdquo; suggested by Mr. Greenwood <a
+name="citation220d"></a><a href="#footnote220d"
+class="citation">[220d]</a> any other than that of Miss Delia
+Bacon, and Judge Webb?&nbsp; True, Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Baconian
+&ldquo;supposing&rdquo; is only a working hypothesis: not a
+confirmed belief.&nbsp; But it is useful to his argument (see
+&ldquo;Ben Jonson and Shakespeare&rdquo;) when he wants to
+explain away Ben&rsquo;s evidence, in his verses in the Folio, to
+the Stratford actor as the Author.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood writes, in the first page of his Preface:
+&ldquo;It is no part of my plan or intention to defend that
+theory,&rdquo; &ldquo;the Baconian theory.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Apparently it pops out contrary to the intention of Mr.
+Greenwood.&nbsp; But pop out it does: at least I can find no flaw
+in the reasoning of my detection of Bacon: I see no way out of it
+except this: <a name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+221</span>after recapitulating what is said about Ben as one of
+Bacon&rsquo;s &ldquo;good pens&rdquo; with other details, Mr.
+Greenwood says, &ldquo;But no doubt that way madness lies!&rdquo;
+<a name="citation221a"></a><a href="#footnote221a"
+class="citation">[221a]</a>&nbsp; Ah no! not madness, no, but
+Baconism &ldquo;lies that way.&rdquo;&nbsp; However, &ldquo;let
+it be granted&rdquo; (as Euclid says in his sportsmanlike way)
+that Mr. Greenwood by no means thinks that his &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo; is Bacon&mdash;only some one similar and similarly
+situated and still active in 1623, and occupied with other
+business than supervising a collected edition of plays written
+under his &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of Shakespeare.&nbsp;
+Bacon, too, was busy, with supervising, or toiling at the Latin
+translation of his scientific works, and Ben (according to Judge
+Webb) was busy in turning the <i>Advancement of Learning</i> into
+Latin prose.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood quotes, without reference,
+Archbishop Tenison as saying that Ben helped Bacon in doing his
+works into Latin. <a name="citation221b"></a><a
+href="#footnote221b" class="citation">[221b]</a>&nbsp; Tenison is
+a very late witness.&nbsp; The prophetic soul of Bacon did not
+quite trust English to last as long as Latin, or he thought
+Latin, the <i>lingua franca</i> of Europe in his day, more easily
+accessible to foreign students, as, of course, it was.&nbsp; Thus
+Bacon was very busy; so was Ben.&nbsp; The sad consequence of
+Ben&rsquo;s business, perhaps, is that the editing of the Folio
+is notoriously bad; whether Ben were the Editor or not, it is
+infamously bad.</p>
+<p>Conceivably Mr. Greenwood is of the same <a
+name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+222</span>opinion.&nbsp; He says, &ldquo;It stands admitted that
+a very large part of that volume&rdquo; (the Folio)
+&ldquo;consists of work that is not
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo; at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>How strange, if Ben edited it for the Great Unknown&mdash;who
+knew, if any human being knew, what work was
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo;!&nbsp; On Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+hypothesis, <a name="citation222a"></a><a href="#footnote222a"
+class="citation">[222a]</a> or &ldquo;supposing,&rdquo; the
+Unknown Author &ldquo;may well have conceived the idea of
+publishing a collected edition of the plays which had been
+written&rdquo; (not &ldquo;published,&rdquo; <i>written</i>)
+&ldquo;under the name of Shakespeare, and, being himself busy
+with other matters, he may have entrusted the business to&rdquo;
+some &ldquo;good pen,&rdquo; &ldquo;and why not
+to&rdquo;&mdash;Ben.&nbsp; Nevertheless &ldquo;a very large part
+of that volume consists of work that is not
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo; at all.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation222b"></a><a href="#footnote222b"
+class="citation">[222b]</a>&nbsp; How did this occur?&nbsp; The
+book <a name="citation222c"></a><a href="#footnote222c"
+class="citation">[222c]</a> is &ldquo;that very doubtful
+&lsquo;canon.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; How, if
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo; man edited it for
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;?&nbsp; Did &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+not care what stuff was placed under his immortal &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>&rdquo;?</p>
+<p>It is not my fault if I think that Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+hypotheses <a name="citation222d"></a><a href="#footnote222d"
+class="citation">[222d]</a>&mdash;the genuine
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; either revised his own works, or put
+Ben on the editorial task&mdash;are absolutely contradicted by
+his statements in another part of his book. <a
+name="citation222e"></a><a href="#footnote222e"
+class="citation">[222e]</a>&nbsp; For the genuine
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; knew what plays he had <a
+name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 223</span>written,
+knew what he could honestly put forth as his own, as
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; Or, if he placed the
+task of editing in Ben&rsquo;s hands, he must have told Ben what
+plays were of his own making.&nbsp; In either case the Folio
+would contain these, and no others.&nbsp; But&mdash;&ldquo;the
+<i>plat contraire</i>,&rdquo;&mdash;the very reverse,&mdash;is
+stated by Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; &ldquo;It stands admitted that a
+very large portion of that volume&rdquo; (the Folio)
+&ldquo;consists of work that is not
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo;&rdquo; (is not Bacon&rsquo;s,
+or the other man&rsquo;s) &ldquo;at all.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation223a"></a><a href="#footnote223a"
+class="citation">[223a]</a>&nbsp; Then away fly the hypotheses <a
+name="citation223b"></a><a href="#footnote223b"
+class="citation">[223b]</a> that the auto-Shakespeare, or that
+Ben, employed by the auto-Shakespeare (apparently Bacon) revised,
+edited, and prepared for publication the auto-Shakespearean
+plays.&nbsp; For Mr. Greenwood &ldquo;has already dealt with
+<i>Titus</i> (<i>Andronicus</i>) and <i>Henry VI</i>,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation223c"></a><a href="#footnote223c"
+class="citation">[223c]</a> and proved them not to be
+auto-Shakespearean&mdash;and he adds &ldquo;there are many other
+plays in that very doubtful &lsquo;canon&rsquo;&rdquo; (the
+Folio) &ldquo;which, by universal admission, contain much
+non-Shakespearean composition.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation223d"></a><a href="#footnote223d"
+class="citation">[223d]</a>&nbsp; Perhaps! but if so the two
+hypotheses, <a name="citation223e"></a><a href="#footnote223e"
+class="citation">[223e]</a> that either the genuine Shakespeare
+<a name="citation223f"></a><a href="#footnote223f"
+class="citation">[223f]</a> revised (&ldquo;is it not a more
+natural solution that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; himself revised
+his works for publication, and that some part, at any rate, of
+this revision <a name="citation223g"></a><a href="#footnote223g"
+class="citation">[223g]</a> was done after 1616 and before
+1623?&rdquo;), or <a name="citation223h"></a><a
+href="#footnote223h" class="citation">[223h]</a> that he gave Ben
+(who was working, by the conjecture, for Bacon) the task of <a
+name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 224</span>editing the
+Folio,&mdash;are annihilated.&nbsp; For neither the
+auto-Shakespeare (if honest), nor Ben (if sober), could have
+stuffed the Folio full of non-Shakespearean work,&mdash;including
+four &ldquo;non-Shakespearean&rdquo; plays,&mdash;nor could the
+Folio be &ldquo;that very doubtful canon.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation224a"></a><a href="#footnote224a"
+class="citation">[224a]</a>&nbsp; Again, if either the
+auto-Shakespeare or Ben following his instructions, were Editor,
+neither could have, as the Folio Editor had &ldquo;evidently no
+little doubt about&rdquo; <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>. <a
+name="citation224b"></a><a href="#footnote224b"
+class="citation">[224b]</a></p>
+<p>Neither Ben, nor the actual Simon Pure, the author, the
+auto-Shakespeare, could fail to know the truth about <i>Trodus
+and Cressida</i>.&nbsp; But the Editor <a
+name="citation224c"></a><a href="#footnote224c"
+class="citation">[224c]</a> did <i>not</i> know the truth, the
+whole canon is &ldquo;doubtful.&rdquo;&nbsp; Therefore the
+hypothesis, the &ldquo;supposing,&rdquo; that the actual author
+did the revising, <a name="citation224d"></a><a
+href="#footnote224d" class="citation">[224d]</a> and the other
+hypothesis that he gave Ben the work, <a
+name="citation224e"></a><a href="#footnote224e"
+class="citation">[224e]</a> seem to me wholly impossible.&nbsp;
+But Mr. Greenwood needs the &ldquo;supposings&rdquo; of pp. 290,
+293; and as he rejects <i>Titus Andronicus</i> and <i>Henry
+VI</i> (both in the Folio), he also needs the contradictory views
+of pp. 351, 358.&nbsp; On which set of supposings and averments
+does he stand to win?</p>
+<p>Perhaps he thinks to find a way out of what appears to me to
+be a dilemma in the following fashion: He will not accept
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i> and <i>Henry VI</i>, though both are in
+the Folio, as the work of <i>his</i> &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+his Unknown, <a name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+225</span>the Bacon of the Baconians.&nbsp; Well, we ask, if your
+Unknown, or Bacon, or Ben,&mdash;instructed by Bacon, or by the
+Unknown,&mdash;edited the Folio, how could any one of the three
+insert <i>Titus</i>, and <i>Henry VI</i>, and be &ldquo;in no
+little doubt about&rdquo; <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>?&nbsp;
+Bacon, or the Unknown, or the Editor employed by either, knew
+perfectly well which plays either man could honestly claim as his
+own work, done under the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; (with or without the
+hyphen).&nbsp; Yet the Editor of the Folio does not
+know&mdash;and Mr. Greenwood does know&mdash;<i>Henry VI</i> and
+<i>Titus</i> are &ldquo;wrong ones.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s way out, if I follow him, is this: <a
+name="citation225a"></a><a href="#footnote225a"
+class="citation">[225a]</a> &ldquo;Judge Stotsenburg asks,
+&lsquo;Who wrote <i>The Taming of a Shrew</i> printed in 1594,
+and who wrote <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, <i>Henry VI</i>, or
+<i>King Lear</i> referred to in the Diary?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+(Henslowe&rsquo;s).&nbsp; The Judge continues: &ldquo;Neither
+Collier nor any of the Shaxper commentators make (<i>sic</i>) any
+claim to their authorship in behalf of William Shaxper.&nbsp;
+Since these plays have the same names as those included in the
+Folio of 1623 the presumption is that they are the same plays
+until the contrary is shown.&nbsp; Of course it may be shown,
+either that those in the Folio are entirely different except in
+name, or that these plays were revised, improved, and dressed by
+some one whom they&rdquo; (who?) &ldquo;called
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood says, &ldquo;My own conviction is <a
+name="page226"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 226</span>that . . .
+these plays were &lsquo;revised, improved, and dressed by some
+one whom they called Shakespeare.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a
+name="citation226a"></a><a href="#footnote226a"
+class="citation">[226a]</a>&nbsp; (Whom <i>who</i> called
+Shakespeare?)&nbsp; In that case these plays,&mdash;say <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i> and <i>Henry VI</i>, Part 1,&mdash;which Mr.
+Greenwood denies to <i>his</i> &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; were
+just as much <i>his</i> Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays as any other
+plays (and there are several), which <i>his</i> Shakespeare
+&ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet
+<i>his</i> Shakespeare is <i>not</i> author of <i>Henry VI</i>,
+<a name="citation226b"></a><a href="#footnote226b"
+class="citation">[226b]</a> not the author of <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i>. <a name="citation226c"></a><a
+href="#footnote226c" class="citation">[226c]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;Mr.
+Anders,&rdquo; writes Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;makes what I think to
+be a great error in citing <i>Henry VI</i> and <i>Titus</i> as
+genuine plays of Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation226d"></a><a href="#footnote226d"
+class="citation">[226d]</a></p>
+<p>He hammers at this denial in nineteen references in his Index
+to <i>Titus Andronicus</i>.&nbsp; Yet Ben, or Bacon, or the
+Unknown thought that these plays <i>were</i> &ldquo;genuine
+plays&rdquo; of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; the concealed
+author&mdash;Bacon or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s man.&nbsp; It appears
+that the immense poet who used the &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>&rdquo; of &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; did not know the
+plays of which he could rightfully call himself the author; that
+(not foreseeing Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s constantly repeated
+objections) he boldly annexed four plays, or two certainly, which
+Mr. Greenwood denies to him, and another about which &ldquo;the
+Folio Editor was in no little doubt.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+227</span>Finally, <a name="citation227a"></a><a
+href="#footnote227a" class="citation">[227a]</a> Mr. Greenwood is
+&ldquo;convinced,&rdquo; &ldquo;it is my conviction&rdquo; that
+some plays which he often denies to his &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+were &ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they
+called Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; That some one, if he edited or
+caused to be edited the Folio, thought that his revision,
+improvement, and dressing up of the plays gave him a right to
+claim their authorship&mdash;and Mr. Greenwood, a dozen times and
+more, denies to him their authorship.</p>
+<p>One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic&rsquo;s
+meaning.&nbsp; <i>The Taming of a Shrew</i>, <i>Titus</i>,
+<i>Henry VI</i>, and <i>King Lear</i>, referred to in
+Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Diary,&rdquo; are not
+&ldquo;Shakespearean,&rdquo; we are repeatedly told.&nbsp; But
+&ldquo;my own conviction is that . . . &rdquo; these plays were
+&ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they
+called Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; But to be revised, improved, and
+dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare, is to be as
+truly &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; work as is any play so handled
+&ldquo;by Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus the plays mentioned are
+as truly &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; as any others in which
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; worked on an earlier canvas, and also
+<i>Titus</i> &ldquo;is not <i>Shakespearean</i> at
+all.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, I repeat, constantly denies the
+&ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; character to <i>Titus</i> and
+<i>Henry VI</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;The conclusion of the whole matter
+is that <i>Titus</i> and <i>The Trilogy of Henry VI</i> are not
+the work of Shakespeare: that his hand is <a
+name="page228"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 228</span>probably
+not to be found at all in <i>Titus</i>, and only once or twice,
+if at all, in <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I, but that he it probably
+was who altered and remodelled the two parts of the old
+<i>Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster</i>, thereby
+producing <i>Henry VI</i>, Parts II and III.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation228a"></a><a href="#footnote228a"
+class="citation">[228a]</a></p>
+<p>Yet <a name="citation228b"></a><a href="#footnote228b"
+class="citation">[228b]</a> <i>Titus</i> and <i>Henry VI</i>
+appear as &ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed&rdquo; by the
+mysterious &ldquo;some one whom they called
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; If Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s conclusion <a
+name="citation228c"></a><a href="#footnote228c"
+class="citation">[228c]</a> be correct, &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+had no right to place <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I, and <i>Titus</i>
+in his Folio.&nbsp; If his &ldquo;conviction&rdquo; <a
+name="citation228d"></a><a href="#footnote228d"
+class="citation">[228d]</a> be correct, Shakespeare had as good a
+right to them as to any of the plays which he revised, and
+improved, and dressed.&nbsp; They <i>must</i> be
+&ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; if Mr. Greenwood is right <a
+name="citation228e"></a><a href="#footnote228e"
+class="citation">[228e]</a> in his suggestion that
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; either revised his works for
+publication between 1616 and 1623, or set his man, Ben Jonson,
+upon that business.&nbsp; Yet neither one nor the other knew what
+to make of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Folio
+Editor had, evidently, no little doubt about that play.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation228f"></a><a href="#footnote228f"
+class="citation">[228f]</a></p>
+<p>So neither &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; nor Ben, instructed by
+him, can have been &ldquo;the Folio Editor.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Consequently Mr. Greenwood must abandon his suggestion that
+either man was the Editor, and may return to his rejection of
+<i>Titus</i> and <i>Henry VI</i>, <a name="page229"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 229</span>Part I.&nbsp; But he clings to
+it.&nbsp; He finds in Henslowe&rsquo;s Diary &ldquo;references
+to, and records of the writing of, such plays&rdquo; as, among
+others, <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, and <i>Henry VI</i>. <a
+name="citation229a"></a><a href="#footnote229a"
+class="citation">[229a]</a></p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, after rejecting a theory of some one, says,
+&ldquo;Far more likely does it appear that there was a great man
+of the time whose genius was capable of &lsquo;transforming dross
+into gold,&rsquo; who took these plays, and, in great part,
+rewrote and revised them, leaving sometimes more, and sometimes
+less of the original work; and that so rewritten, revised, and
+transformed they appeared as the plays of
+&lsquo;Shake-speare.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation229b"></a><a
+href="#footnote229b" class="citation">[229b]</a></p>
+<p>This statement is made <a name="citation229c"></a><a
+href="#footnote229c" class="citation">[229c]</a> about
+&ldquo;these plays,&rdquo; including <i>Titus Andronicus</i> and
+<i>Henry VI</i>, while <a name="citation229d"></a><a
+href="#footnote229d" class="citation">[229d]</a>
+&ldquo;<i>Titus</i> and the <i>Trilogy of Henry VI</i> are not
+the work of Shakespeare . . . his hand is probably not to be
+found at all in <i>Titus</i>, and only once or twice in <i>Henry
+VI</i>, Part I,&rdquo; though he probably made Parts II and III
+out of older plays.</p>
+<p>I do not know where to have the critic.&nbsp; If <i>Henry
+VI</i>, Part I, and <i>Titus</i> are in no sense by
+&ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; then neither &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+nor Ben for him edited or had anything to do with the editing of
+the Folio.&nbsp; If either or both had to do with the editing, as
+the critic suggests, then <a name="page230"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 230</span>he is wrong in denying Shakespearean
+origin to <i>Titus</i> and <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I.</p>
+<p>Of course one sees a way out of the dilemma for the great
+auto-Shakespeare himself, who, by one hypothesis, handed over the
+editing of his plays to Ben (<i>he</i>, by Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;supposing,&rdquo; was deviling at literary jobs for
+Bacon).&nbsp; The auto-Shakespeare merely tells Ben to edit his
+plays, and never even gives him a list of them.&nbsp; Then Ben
+brings him the Folio, and the author looks at the list of
+Plays.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mr. Jonson,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;I have hitherto held
+thee for an honest scholar and a deserving man in the quality
+thou dost profess.&nbsp; But thou hast brought me a maimed and
+deformed printed copy of that which I did write for my own
+recreation, not wishful to be known for so light a thing as a
+poet.&nbsp; Moreover, thou hast placed among these my trifles,
+four plays to which I never put a finger, and others in which I
+had no more than a thumb.&nbsp; The Seneschal, Mr. Jonson, will
+pay thee what is due to thee; thy fardels shall be sent
+whithersoever thou wilt, and, Mary!&nbsp; Mr. Jonson, I bid thee
+never more be officer of mine.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This painful discourse must have been held at
+Gorhambury,&mdash;if Ben edited the Folio&mdash;for Francis.</p>
+<p>It is manifest, I hope, that about the Folio Mr. Greenwood
+speaks with two voices, and these very discordant.&nbsp; It is
+also manifest that, whoever wrote the plays left his materials in
+deep <a name="page231"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+231</span>neglect, and that, when they were collected, some one
+gathered them up in extreme disorder.&nbsp; It is extraordinary
+that the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood do not see the fallacy of
+their own reasoning in this matter of the Folio.&nbsp; They
+constantly ridicule the old view that the actor, Will Shakspere
+(if, by miracle, he were the author of the plays), could have
+left them to take their fortunes.&nbsp; They are asked, what did
+other playwrights do in that age?&nbsp; They often parted with
+their whole copyright to the actors of this or that company, or
+to Henslowe.&nbsp; The new owners could alter the plays at will,
+and were notoriously anxious to keep them out of print, lest
+other companies should act them.&nbsp; As Mr. Greenwood writes,
+<a name="citation231a"></a><a href="#footnote231a"
+class="citation">[231a]</a> &ldquo;Such, we are told, was the
+universal custom with dramatists of the day; they &lsquo;kept no
+copies&rsquo; of their plays, and thought no more about
+them.&nbsp; It will, I suppose, be set down to fanaticism that I
+should doubt the truth of this proposition, that I doubt if it be
+consonant with the known facts of human nature.&rdquo;&nbsp; But
+whom, except Jonson, does Mr. Greenwood find editing and
+publishing his plays?&nbsp; Beaumont, Fletcher, Heywood?&nbsp;
+No!</p>
+<p>If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as
+bad as Will&rsquo;s.&nbsp; If he were alive and revised his own
+work for publication, <a name="citation231b"></a><a
+href="#footnote231b" class="citation">[231b]</a> he did it as the
+office cat might have done it in <a name="page232"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 232</span>hours of play.&nbsp; If, on the
+other side, he handed the editorial task over to Ben, <a
+name="citation232a"></a><a href="#footnote232a"
+class="citation">[232a]</a> then he did not even give Ben a list
+of his genuine works.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood cites the case of Ben
+Jonson, a notorious and, I think, solitary exception.&nbsp; Ben
+was and often proclaimed himself to be essentially a
+scholar.&nbsp; He took as much pains in prefacing, editing, and
+annotating his plays, as he would have taken had the texts been
+those of Greek tragedians.</p>
+<p>Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour
+of the actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he
+did not bestir himself, and bring them out in a collected
+edition.&nbsp; Yet no English dramatist ventured on doing such a
+thing, till Ben thus collected his &ldquo;works&rdquo; (and was
+laughed at) in 1616.&nbsp; The example might have encouraged Will
+to be up and doing, but he died early in 1616.&nbsp; If Will were
+<i>not</i> the author, what care was Bacon, or the Unknown,
+taking of his many manuscript plays, and for the proper editing
+of those which had appeared separately in pamphlets?&nbsp; As
+indolent and casual as Will, the great Author, Bacon or another,
+left the plays to take their chances.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood says
+that &ldquo;<i>if the author</i>&rdquo; (Bacon or somebody very
+like him) &ldquo;<i>had been careless about keeping copies of his
+manuscripts</i> . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation232b"></a><a
+href="#footnote232b" class="citation">[232b]</a>&nbsp; What an
+&ldquo;if&rdquo; in the case of the great Author!&nbsp; This
+gross <a name="page233"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+233</span>neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised
+by the Great Unknown himself.</p>
+<p>In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;There is overwhelming
+authority for the view that <i>Titus Andronicus</i> is not
+<i>Shakespearean</i> at all.&rdquo; <a name="citation233a"></a><a
+href="#footnote233a" class="citation">[233a]</a>&nbsp; In that
+case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for either,
+can have been the person who put <i>Titus</i> into the Folio.</p>
+<h2><a name="page235"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+235</span>XII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> evidence of Ben Jonson to the
+identity of Shakespeare the author with Shakspere the actor, is
+&ldquo;the strength of the Stratfordian faith,&rdquo; says Mr.
+Greenwood.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I think it will be admitted that the
+various Jonsonian utterances with regard to
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; are by no means easy to reconcile one
+with the other.&rdquo; <a name="citation237a"></a><a
+href="#footnote237a" class="citation">[237a]</a></p>
+<p>It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+forty-seven pages about the evidence of Jonson.&nbsp; But, first,
+whenever in written words or in reported conversation, Ben speaks
+of Shakespeare by name, he speaks of his <i>works</i>: in 1619 to
+Drummond of Hawthornden; in 1623 in commendatory verses to the
+Folio; while, about 1630, probably, in his posthumously published
+<i>Discourses</i>, he writes on Shakespeare as the friend and
+&ldquo;fellow&rdquo; of the players, on Shakespeare as his own
+friend, and as a dramatist.&nbsp; On each of these three
+occasions, Ben&rsquo;s <i>tone</i> varies.&nbsp; In 1619 he said
+no more to Drummond of Hawthornden (apparently on two separate
+occasions) than that Shakespeare &ldquo;lacked art,&rdquo; and
+made the mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.</p>
+<p><a name="page238"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 238</span>In
+1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to
+Drummond he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had
+panegyrised in an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again
+to praise in the commendatory verses in the Folio.&nbsp; He spoke
+still more harshly of Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to
+Homer, Virgil, Theocritus, and Tyr&aelig;us!&nbsp; He told an
+unkind anecdote of Marston, with whom he had first quarrelled and
+then made friends, collaborating with him in a play; and very
+generously and to his great peril, sharing his
+imprisonment.&nbsp; To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he
+&ldquo;beat Marston and took away his pistol.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of Sir
+John Beaumont, brother of the dramatist, Ben had written a most
+hyperbolical eulogy in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond
+Ben did not speak of him.&nbsp; Such was Ben, in panegyric verse
+hyperbolical; in conversation &ldquo;a despiser of others, and
+praiser of himself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Compare Ben&rsquo;s three
+remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond.&nbsp; Donne deserved
+hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being
+understood: and Donne was in some points the first of living
+poets.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s effort to disable Jonson&rsquo;s
+evidence rests on the contradictions in his estimates of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s poetry, in notices scattered through some
+thirty years.&nbsp; Jonson, it is argued, cannot on each occasion
+mean Will.&nbsp; He must now mean Will, now the Great Unknown,
+and <a name="page239"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+239</span>now&mdash;both at once.&nbsp; Yet I have proved that
+Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the
+occasion, and on his humour at the moment.&nbsp; This is a
+commonplace of literary history.&nbsp; The Baconians do not know
+it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores it, and bases his
+argument on facts which may be unknown to his readers.&nbsp; We
+have noted Ben&rsquo;s words of 1619, and touched on his
+panegyric of 1623.&nbsp; Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote
+in his manuscript book <i>Discourses</i> an affectionate but
+critical page on Shakespeare as a man and an author.&nbsp;
+Always, in prose, and in verse, and in recorded conversation, Ben
+explicitly identified Shakspere (William, of Stratford) with the
+author of the plays usually ascribed to him.&nbsp; But the
+Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age), and the
+anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret
+Ben&rsquo;s words on the theory that, in 1623, he &ldquo;had his
+tongue in his cheek&rdquo;; that, like Odysseus, he
+&ldquo;mingled things false with true,&rdquo; that <i>they</i>
+know what is true from what is false, and can undo the many knots
+which Ben tied in his tongue.&nbsp; How they succeed we shall
+see.</p>
+<p>In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name
+(1619, 1623, 1630?), Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival
+at a much earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in
+<i>The Poetaster</i> (1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist
+in an epigram, <i>Poet-Ape</i>, published in his collected works
+of 1616; but probably <a name="page240"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 240</span>written as early as 1602.&nbsp; It
+is well known that in 1598 Shakespeare&rsquo;s company acted
+Ben&rsquo;s <i>Every Man in His Humour</i>.&nbsp; It appears that
+he conceived some grudge against the actors, and apparently
+against Shakespeare and other playwrights, for, in 1601, his
+<i>Poetaster</i> is a satire both on playwrights and on actors,
+whom he calls &ldquo;apes.&rdquo;&nbsp; The apparent attacks on
+Shakespeare are just such as Ben, if angry and envious, would
+direct against him; while we know of no other poet-player of the
+period to whom they could apply.&nbsp; For example, in <i>The
+Poetaster</i>, Histrio, the actor, is advised to ingratiate
+himself with <i>Pantalabus</i>, &ldquo;gent&rsquo;man
+parcel-poet, his father was a man of worship, I tell
+thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is perhaps unmistakably a blow at
+Shakespeare, who had recently acquired for his father and himself
+arms, and the pleasure of writing himself
+&ldquo;gentleman.&rdquo;&nbsp; This &ldquo;parcel-poet
+gent&rsquo;man&rdquo; &ldquo;pens lofty, in a new stalking
+style,&rdquo;&mdash;he is thus an author, he &ldquo;pens,&rdquo;
+and in a high style.&nbsp; He is called <i>Pantalabus</i>, from
+the Greek words for &ldquo;to <i>take up all</i>,&rdquo; which
+means that, as poet, he is a plagiarist.&nbsp; Jonson repeats
+this charge in his verses called <i>Poet-Ape</i>&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>He takes up all</i>, makes each
+man&rsquo;s wit his own,<br />
+And told of this, he slights it.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In a scene added to <i>The Poetaster</i> in 1616, the author
+(Ben) is advised not</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;With a sad and serious verse to wound<br />
+Pantalabus, railing in his saucy jests,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page241"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 241</span>and
+obviously slighting the charges of plagiarism.&nbsp; Perhaps Ben
+is glancing at Shakespeare, who, if accused of plagiary by an
+angry rival, would merely laugh.</p>
+<p>A reply to the <i>Poetaster</i>, namely <i>Satiromastix</i>
+(by Dekker and Marston?), introduces Jonson himself as babbling
+darkly about &ldquo;Mr. Justice Shallow,&rdquo; and &ldquo;an
+Innocent Moor&rdquo; (Othello?).&nbsp; Here is question of
+&ldquo;administering strong pills&rdquo; to Jonson;
+<i>then</i>,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;What lumps of hard and indigested stuff,<br
+/>
+Of bitter <i>Satirism</i>, of <i>Arrogance</i>,<br />
+Of <i>Self-love</i>, of <i>Detraction</i>, of a black<br />
+And stinking <i>Insolence</i> should we fetch up!&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This &ldquo;pill&rdquo; is a reply to Ben&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;purge&rdquo; for the poets in his <i>Poetaster</i>.&nbsp;
+Oh, the sad old stuff!</p>
+<p>Referring to Jonson&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>, and to
+<i>Satiromastix</i>, the counter-attack, we find a passage in the
+Cambridge play, <i>The Return from Parnassus</i> (about
+1602).&nbsp; Burbage, the tragic actor, and Kempe, the low-comedy
+man of Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, are introduced, discussing
+the possible merits of Cambridge wits as playwrights.&nbsp; Kempe
+rejects them as they &ldquo;smell too much of that writer Ovid,
+and that writer Metamorphosis . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; The purpose, of
+course, is to laugh at the ignorance of the low-comedy man, who
+thinks &ldquo;Metamorphosis&rdquo; a writer, and does not
+suspect&mdash;how should he?&mdash;that Shakespeare &ldquo;smells
+of Ovid.&rdquo;&nbsp; Kempe innocently goes on, &ldquo;Why,
+here&rsquo;s our fellow&rdquo; (comrade) &ldquo;Shakespeare puts
+them all <a name="page242"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+242</span>down&rdquo; (all the University playwrights),
+&ldquo;aye, and Ben Jonson too.&nbsp; O that Ben Jonson is a
+pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace&rdquo; (in <i>The
+Poetaster</i>) &ldquo;giving the poets a pill, but our fellow
+Shakespeare hath given him a purge . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not
+purge) which, in <i>Satiromastix</i>, might be administered to
+Jonson.&nbsp; The Cambridge author may have thought that
+Shakespeare wrote the passage on the pill which was to
+&ldquo;fetch up&rdquo; masses of Ben&rsquo;s insolence,
+self-love, arrogance, and detraction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Stupid old nonsense!&nbsp; There are other more or less obscure
+indications of Jonson&rsquo;s spite, during the stage-quarrel,
+against Shakespeare, but the most unmistakable proof lies in his
+verses in &ldquo;Poet-Ape.&rdquo;&nbsp; I am aware that
+Ben&rsquo;s intention here to hit at Shakespeare has been denied,
+for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of
+language.&nbsp; But though I would fain agree with him, the
+object of attack can be no known person save Will.&nbsp; Jonson
+was already, in <i>The Poetaster</i>, using the term
+&ldquo;<i>Poet-Ape</i>,&rdquo; for he calls the actors at large
+&ldquo;apes.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in
+the Epigrams of his first Folio (1616).&nbsp; By that date, the
+year of Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, if he really loved
+Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose, Ben might have <a
+name="page243"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 243</span>suppressed
+the verses.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Like Moli&egrave;re, Shakespeare had outlived
+the charge of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben.</p>
+<p>Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright &ldquo;<i>that would be
+thought our chief</i>&rdquo;&mdash;words which, by 1601, could
+only apply to Shakespeare; there was no rival, save Ben, near his
+throne.&nbsp; The playwright-actor, too, has now confessedly</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;grown<br />
+To a little wealth and credit in the scene,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>of no other actor-playwright could this be said.</p>
+<p>He is the author of &ldquo;works&rdquo; (Jonson was laughed at
+for calling his own plays &ldquo;works&rdquo;), but these works
+are &ldquo;the frippery of wit,&rdquo; that is, a tissue of
+plagiarisms, as in the case of <i>Pantalabus</i>.&nbsp; But
+&ldquo;told of this he slights it,&rdquo; as most successful
+authors, when accused, as they often are, of plagiarism by
+jealous rivals, wisely do;&mdash;so did Moli&egrave;re.&nbsp;
+This Poet-Ape began his career by &ldquo;picking and
+gleaning&rdquo; and &ldquo;buying reversions of old
+plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; This means that Shakespeare <i>did</i> work
+over earlier plays which his company had acquired; or, if
+Shakespeare did not,&mdash;then, I presume,&mdash;Bacon did!</p>
+<p><i>That</i>, with much bad humour, is the gist of the rhymes
+on Poet-Ape.&nbsp; Ben thinks Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;works&rdquo; very larcenous, but still, the
+&ldquo;works,&rdquo; as such, are those of the poet-actor.&nbsp;
+I <a name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 244</span>hope
+it is now clear that Poet-Ape, who, like <i>Pantalabus</i>,
+&ldquo;takes up all&rdquo;; who has &ldquo;grown to a little
+wealth and credit in the scene,&rdquo; and who &ldquo;thinks
+himself the chief&rdquo; of contemporary dramatists, can be
+nobody but Shakespeare.&nbsp; Hence it follows that the
+&ldquo;works&rdquo; of Poet-Ape, are the works of
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; Ben admits, nay, asserts the existence of the
+works, says that they may reach &ldquo;the after-time,&rdquo; but
+he calls them a mass of plagiarisms,&mdash;because he is in a
+jealous rage.</p>
+<p>But this view does not at all suit Mr. Greenwood, for it shows
+Ben regarding Shakespeare as the &ldquo;Ape,&rdquo; or Actor, and
+also as the &ldquo;Poet&rdquo; and author of the
+&ldquo;works.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet Ben&rsquo;s words mean nothing if
+not that an actor is the author of works which Ben accuses of
+plagiarism.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood thinks that the epigram proves
+merely that &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The work which goes in his name is, in truth, the work of
+somebody else.&rdquo; <a name="citation244a"></a><a
+href="#footnote244a" class="citation">[244a]</a>&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood put the same interpretation on Greene&rsquo;s words
+about &ldquo;Shakescene,&rdquo; and we showed that the
+interpretation was impossible.&nbsp; &ldquo;The utmost we should
+be entitled to say&rdquo; (if Shake-scene be meant for Shakspere)
+&ldquo;is that Greene accuses Player Shakspere of putting
+forward, as his own, some work <a name="page245"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 245</span>or perhaps some parts of a work, for
+which he was really indebted to another.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation245a"></a><a href="#footnote245a"
+class="citation">[245a]</a>&nbsp; We proved, by quoting
+Greene&rsquo;s words, that he said nothing which could be
+tortured into this sense. <a name="citation245b"></a><a
+href="#footnote245b" class="citation">[245b]</a>&nbsp; In the
+same way Ben&rsquo;s words cannot be tortured into the sense that
+&ldquo;the work which goes in his&rdquo; (Poet-Ape&rsquo;s)
+&ldquo;name is, in truth, the work of somebody else.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation245c"></a><a href="#footnote245c"
+class="citation">[245c]</a>&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood tries to find the
+Anti-Willian hypothesis in Greene&rsquo;s <i>Groatsworth of
+Wit</i> and in Ben&rsquo;s epigram.&nbsp; It is in neither.</p>
+<p>Jonson is not accusing Shakespeare of pretending to be the
+author of plays written by somebody else, but of &ldquo;making
+<i>each man&rsquo;s</i> wit his own,&rdquo; and the <i>men</i>
+are the other dramatists of the day.&nbsp; Thus the future
+&ldquo;may judge&rdquo; Shakespeare&rsquo;s work &ldquo;to be his
+as well as <i>ours</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is &ldquo;we,&rdquo; the living and recognised dramatists,
+whom Shakespeare is said to plagiarise from; so boldly that</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>We</i>, <i>the robbed</i>, leave rage,
+and pity it.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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 &ldquo;us, the
+robbed.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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 <a name="page246"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 246</span>William Shak(&amp;c.).&nbsp; 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; &ldquo;after times may judge
+them to be his,&rdquo; as after times do to this hour.</p>
+<p>Thus Ben expresses, in accordance with his humour on each
+occasion, most discrepant opinions of Will&rsquo;s works, but he
+never varies from his identification of Will with the author of
+the plays.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;works&rdquo; of which Ben wrote so splenetically in
+<i>Poet-Ape</i>, were the works of a Playwright-Actor, who could
+be nobody but the actor Shakespeare, as far as Ben then
+knew.&nbsp; If later, and in altered circumstances, he wrote of
+the very same works in very different terms, his
+&ldquo;utterances&rdquo; are &ldquo;not easily
+reconcilable&rdquo; with each other,&mdash;<i>whoever</i> the
+real author of the works may be.&nbsp; If Bacon, or Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s anonymous equivalent for Bacon, were the
+author, and if Ben came to know it, his attitudes towards the
+<i>works</i> are still as irreconcilable as ever.</p>
+<p>Perhaps Baconians and Mr. Greenwood might say, &ldquo;as long
+as Ben believed that the works were those of an Actor-Playwright,
+he thought them execrable.&nbsp; But when he learned that they
+were the works of Bacon (or of some Great One), he declared them
+to be more than excellent&rdquo;&mdash;<i>but not to
+Drummond</i>.&nbsp; I am reluctant to think that Jonson was the
+falsest and meanest of snobs.&nbsp; <a name="page247"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 247</span>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,&mdash;not too much in the way of praise,&mdash;but a good
+deal more than he later said (1630?), in prose, and in cold
+blood.&nbsp; I am only taking Ben as I find him and as I
+understand him.&nbsp; Every step in my argument rests on
+well-known facts.&nbsp; Ben notoriously, in his many panegyric
+verses, wrote in a style of inflated praise.&nbsp; In
+conversation with Drummond he censured, in brief blunt phrases,
+the men whom, in verse, he had extolled.&nbsp; The Baconian who
+has not read all Ben&rsquo;s panegyrics in verse, and the whole
+of his conversations with Drummond, argues in ignorance.</p>
+<p>We now come to Ben&rsquo;s panegyrics in the Folio of
+1623.&nbsp; Ben heads the lines,</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;<span
+class="GutSmall">TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED</span><br />
+THE AUTHOR<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">AND</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.</span>&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Words cannot be more explicit.&nbsp; Bacon was alive (I do not
+know when Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s hidden genius died), and Ben goes
+on to speak of the <a name="page248"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+248</span>Author, Shakespeare, as dead, and buried.&nbsp; He
+calls on him thus:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Soul of the Age!<br />
+The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!<br />
+My Shakespear rise: I will not lodge thee by<br />
+Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie<br />
+A little further, to make thee a room:<br />
+Thou art a monument, without a tomb,<br />
+And art alive still, while thy book doth live,<br />
+And we have wits to read, and praise to give.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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.&nbsp; In the panegyric follow the lines:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;And though thou hadst small Latin and less
+Greek,<br />
+From thence to honour thee I would not seek<br />
+For names, but call forth thund&rsquo;ring
+&AElig;schylus,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>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 &ldquo;did from their ashes
+come.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Jonson means, &ldquo;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&rdquo;?</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians believe that the author of the
+plays abounded in Latin and Greek.&nbsp; In my opinion his
+classical scholarship must have seemed slight indeed to Ben, so
+<a name="page249"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 249</span>learned
+and so vain of his learning: but this is part of a vexed
+question, already examined.&nbsp; So far, Ben&rsquo;s verses have
+brought not a hint to suggest that he does not identify the
+actor, his Beloved, with the author.&nbsp; Nothing is gained when
+Ben, in commendatory verses, praises &ldquo;Thy Art,&rdquo;
+whereas, speaking to Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), he said that
+Shakespeare &ldquo;wanted art.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben is not now
+growling to Drummond of Hawthornden: he is writing a panegyric,
+and applauds Shakespeare&rsquo;s &ldquo;well-turned and
+true-filed lines,&rdquo; adding that, &ldquo;to write a living
+line&rdquo; a man &ldquo;must sweat,&rdquo; and &ldquo;strike the
+second heat upon the Muses&rsquo; anvil.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To produce such lines requires labour, requires conscious
+&ldquo;art.&rdquo;&nbsp; So Shakespeare <i>had</i>
+&ldquo;art,&rdquo; after all, despite what Ben had said to
+Drummond: &ldquo;Shakespeare lacked art.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no
+more in the matter; the &ldquo;inconsistency&rdquo; is that of
+Ben&rsquo;s humours on two perfectly different occasions, now
+grumbling to Drummond; and now writing hyperbolically in
+commendatory verses.&nbsp; But the contrast makes Mr. Greenwood
+exclaim, &ldquo;Can anything be more astonishing and at the same
+time more unsatisfactory than this?&rdquo; <a
+name="citation249a"></a><a href="#footnote249a"
+class="citation">[249a]</a></p>
+<p>Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?</p>
+<p>Did he know the secret of the authorship in 1619?&nbsp; If so,
+why did he say nothing about the plays of the Great Unknown (whom
+he called Shakespeare), save what Drummond reports, <a
+name="page250"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 250</span>&ldquo;want
+of art,&rdquo; ignorance of Bohemian geography.&nbsp; Or did Ben
+<i>not</i> 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?&nbsp; If so, Ben was as
+absolutely inconsistent, as before.&nbsp; There is no way out of
+this dilemma.&nbsp; On neither choice are Ben&rsquo;s utterances
+&ldquo;easy to reconcile one with the other,&rdquo; except on the
+ground that Ben was&mdash;Ben, and his comments varied with his
+varying humours and occasions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was warmed with the heat of poetic composition
+and wound up to heights of eulogy, though even <i>now</i> he
+could not forget the small Latin and less Greek!</p>
+<p>We now turn to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s views about the
+commendatory verses.&nbsp; On mature consideration I say nothing
+of his remarks on Ben&rsquo;s couplets about the bad engraved
+portrait. <a name="citation250a"></a><a href="#footnote250a"
+class="citation">[250a]</a>&nbsp; They are concerned with the
+supposed &ldquo;<i>original</i> bust,&rdquo; as represented in
+Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving of 1656.&nbsp; What the Baconians hope
+to make out of &ldquo;the <i>original</i> bust&rdquo; I am quite
+unable to understand. <a name="citation250b"></a><a
+href="#footnote250b" class="citation">[250b]</a>&nbsp; Again, I
+leave untouched some witticisms <a name="citation250c"></a><a
+href="#footnote250c" class="citation">[250c]</a> on
+Jonson&rsquo;s lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in
+their tombs&mdash;lines <a name="page251"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 251</span>either suggested by, or suggestive
+of others by an uncertain W. Basse, &ldquo;but the evidence of
+authorship seems somewhat doubtful.&nbsp; How the date is
+determined I do not know . . . &rdquo; <a
+name="citation251a"></a><a href="#footnote251a"
+class="citation">[251a]</a>&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s evidence, I
+glance and pass by.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then follow these memorable words, which I have already
+discussed:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And though thou hadst small Latin
+and less Greek . . . &rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation251b"></a><a
+href="#footnote251b" class="citation">[251b]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In &ldquo;these memorable words,&rdquo; every non-Baconian
+sees Ben&rsquo;s opinion about his friend&rsquo;s lack of
+scholarship.&nbsp; According to his own excellent Index, Mr.
+Greenwood has already adverted often to &ldquo;these memorable
+words.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>(1)&nbsp; P. 40.&nbsp; &ldquo; . . . 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&rsquo;s
+other utterances as published in the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; But I
+shall have more to say as to that further on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>(2)&nbsp; P. 88.&nbsp; Nothing of importance.</p>
+<p>(3)&nbsp; P. 220.&nbsp; Quotation from Dr. Johnson.&nbsp; Ben,
+&ldquo;who had no imaginable temptation to falsehood,&rdquo;
+wrote the memorable words.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood has to imagine
+a &ldquo;temptation to falsehood,&rdquo;&mdash;and he does.</p>
+<p><a name="page252"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+252</span>(4)&nbsp; P. 222.&nbsp; &ldquo;And we have recognised
+that Jonson&rsquo;s &lsquo;small Latin and less Greek&rsquo; must
+be explained away&rdquo; (a quotation from somebody).</p>
+<p>(5)&nbsp; P. 225.&nbsp; Allusion to anecdote of &ldquo;Latin
+(latten) spoons.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>(6)&nbsp; Pp. 382, 383.&nbsp; &ldquo;Some of us&rdquo; (some
+of whom?) &ldquo;have long looked upon it as axiomatic . . . that
+Jonson&rsquo;s &lsquo;small Latin and less Greek,&rsquo; if meant
+to be taken seriously, can only be applicable to Shakspere of
+Stratford and not to Shakespeare,&rdquo; that is, not to the
+Unknown author.&nbsp; Unluckily Ben, in 1623, is addressing the
+shade of the &ldquo;sweet Swan of Avon,&rdquo; meaning
+Stratford-on-Avon.</p>
+<p>(7)&nbsp; The next references in the laudable Index are to pp.
+474, 475.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then follow these memorable words, which I
+have already discussed:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;&lsquo;And though thou hadst small Latin
+and less Greek,&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>words which those who see how singularly inappropriate they
+are to the author of the <i>Plays</i> and <i>Poems</i> 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.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><i>I</i> do not want to &ldquo;explain&rdquo; Ben&rsquo;s
+words &ldquo;away&rdquo;: I want to know how on earth Mr.
+Greenwood explains them away.&nbsp; My view is that Ben meant
+what he said, that Will, whose shade he is addressing, was no
+scholar (which he assuredly was not).&nbsp; I diligently search
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s <a name="page253"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 253</span>scriptures, asking How does he
+explain Ben&rsquo;s &ldquo;memorable words&rdquo; away?&nbsp; On
+p. 106 of <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i> I seem to catch
+a glimmer of his method.&nbsp; &ldquo;Once let the
+Stratfordians&rdquo; (every human and non-Baconian person of
+education) &ldquo;admit that Jonson when he penned the words
+&lsquo;small Latin and less Greek&rsquo; was really writing
+&lsquo;with his tongue in his cheek.&rsquo; . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Once admit that vulgarism concerning a great English poet
+engaged on a poem of Pindaric flight, and of prophetic
+vision!&nbsp; No, we leave the admission to Mr. Greenwood and his
+allies.</p>
+<p>To consider thus is to consider too seriously.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;admit&rdquo; that Ben wrote his verses
+&ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek.&rdquo;&nbsp; Elsewhere, <a
+name="citation253a"></a><a href="#footnote253a"
+class="citation">[253a]</a> in place of Ben&rsquo;s &ldquo;tongue
+in his cheek,&rdquo; Mr. Greenwood prefers to suggest that Ben
+&ldquo;is here indulging in a little Socratic irony.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Socrates &ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek&rdquo;!&nbsp; Say
+&ldquo;talking through his throat,&rdquo; if one may accept the
+evidence of the author of <i>Raffles</i>, as to the idioms of
+burglars.</p>
+<p>To return to criticism, we are to admit that Jonson was really
+writing &ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek,&rdquo; knowing that,
+as a fact, &ldquo;<i>Shakespeare</i>&rdquo; <a
+name="page254"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 254</span>(the Great
+Unknown, the Bacon of the Baconians) &ldquo;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.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation254a"></a><a href="#footnote254a"
+class="citation">[254a]</a></p>
+<p>So this is Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s method of &ldquo;explaining
+away&rdquo; the memorable words.&nbsp; He seems to conjecture
+that Will was not <i>Shakespeare</i>, 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
+&ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo;; that the address to the &ldquo;Swan of
+Avon&rdquo; is a mere blind; and that Ben only alludes to his
+&ldquo;Beloved,&rdquo; the Stratford actor, when he tells his
+Beloved that his Beloved has &ldquo;small Latin and less
+Greek.&rdquo;&nbsp; All the praise is for Bacon, or the Great
+Unknown (Mr. Harris), the jeer is for &ldquo;his Beloved, the
+Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And what he hath left
+Us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>As far as I presume to understand this theory of the
+&ldquo;tongue in the cheek,&rdquo; of the &ldquo;Socratic
+irony,&rdquo; this is what Mr. Greenwood has to propose towards
+&ldquo;explaining away&rdquo; the evidence of Ben Jonson, in his
+famous commendatory verses.&nbsp; When we can see through the
+dust of words we find that the &ldquo;esoteric
+interpretation&rdquo; of the commendatory verses is merely a
+reassertion of the general theory: a man with small Latin and <a
+name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 255</span>less Greek
+could not have written the plays and poems.&nbsp; Therefore when
+Ben explicitly states that his Beloved, Mr. Shakespeare of
+Stratford, the Swan of Avon <i>did</i> write the plays, and had
+small Latin and less Greek, Ben meant that he did <i>not</i>
+write them, that they were written by somebody else who had
+plenty of Greek and Latin.&nbsp; It is a strange logical
+method!&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood merely reasserts his paradox, and
+proves it, like certain Biblical critics of more orthodoxy than
+sense, by aid of his private &ldquo;esoteric method of
+interpretation.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben died in 1637; his MS. collection of
+notes and brief essays, and reflections, was published in
+1641.&nbsp; Bacon, of whom he wrote his impressions in this
+manuscript, had died in 1626.&nbsp; Ben was no longer young: he
+says, among these notes, that his memory, once unusually strong,
+after he was past forty &ldquo;is much decayed in me . . .&nbsp;
+It was wont to be faithful to me, but shaken with age now . .
+.&rdquo;&nbsp; (I copy the extract as given by Mr. Greenwood. <a
+name="citation255a"></a><a href="#footnote255a"
+class="citation">[255a]</a>)&nbsp; He spoke sooth: he attributes
+to Orpheus, in <a name="page256"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+256</span>&ldquo;Timber,&rdquo; a line from Homer, and quotes
+from Homer what is not in that poet&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;works.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In this manuscript occurs, then, a brief prose note, headed,
+<i>De Shakespeare nostrati</i>, on our countryman
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; It is an anecdote of the Players and their
+ignorance, with a few critical and personal remarks on
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember the players have often
+mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that (whatsoever he
+penned) he never blotted out a line.&nbsp; My answer hath been,
+&lsquo;Would he had blotted a thousand,&rsquo; which they thought
+a malevolent speech.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Sufflaminandus erat</i>,&rsquo; as
+Augustus said of Haterius.&nbsp; His wit was in his own power;
+would the rule of it had been so too!&nbsp; Many times he fell
+into those things could not escape laughter, as when he said in
+the person of C&aelig;sar, one speaking to him,
+&lsquo;C&aelig;sar, thou dost me wrong.&rsquo;&nbsp; He replied,
+&lsquo;C&aelig;sar did never wrong but with just cause&rsquo;;
+and such like, which were ridiculous.&nbsp; But he redeemed his
+vices with his virtues.&nbsp; <a name="page257"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 257</span>There was ever more in him to be
+praised than to be pardoned.&rdquo;&nbsp; Baconians actually
+maintain that Ben is here speaking of Bacon.</p>
+<p>Of whom is Ben writing?&nbsp; Of the author of <i>Julius
+C&aelig;sar</i>,&mdash;certainly, from which, his memory failing,
+he misquotes a line.&nbsp; If Ben be in the great
+secret&mdash;that the author was Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; Meanwhile the person of whom he
+speaks <i>is here the actor-author</i>, whom the players, his
+friends, commended &ldquo;wherein he faulted,&rdquo; namely, in
+not &ldquo;blotting&rdquo; where, in a thousand cases, Ben wishes
+that he <i>had</i> blotted.&nbsp; Can the most enthusiastic
+Baconian believe that when Ben wrote about the players&rsquo;
+ignorant applause of Shakespeare&rsquo;s, of their friend&rsquo;s
+lack of care in correction, Ben had Bacon in his mind?</p>
+<p>As for Mr. Greenwood, he says that in Ben&rsquo;s sentence
+about the players and their ignorant commendation, &ldquo;we have
+it on Jonson&rsquo;s testimony that the players looked upon
+William <a name="page258"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+258</span>Shakspere the actor as the author of the plays and
+praised him for never blotting out a line.&rdquo;&nbsp; We have
+it, and how is the critic to get over or round the fact?&nbsp;
+Thus, &ldquo;We know that this statement&rdquo; (about the almost
+blotless lines) &ldquo;is ridiculous; that if the players had any
+unblotted manuscripts in their hands (which is by no means
+probable) they were merely fair copies . . . &rdquo;</p>
+<p>Perhaps, but the Baconians appear to assume that a &ldquo;fair
+copy&rdquo; is not, and cannot be, a copy in the handwriting of
+the author.</p>
+<p>As I have said before, the Players knew Will&rsquo;s
+handwriting, if he could write.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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,
+&ldquo;on Jonson&rsquo;s testimony&rdquo; in his authorship.</p>
+<p>To finish Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s observations, &ldquo;if
+they&rdquo; (the players) &ldquo;really thought that the author
+of the plays wrote them off <i>currente calamo</i>, and
+never&rdquo; (or &ldquo;hardly ever&rdquo;) &ldquo;blotted a
+line, never revised, never made any alterations, they knew
+nothing whatever concerning the real Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation258a"></a><a href="#footnote258a"
+class="citation">[258a]</a></p>
+<p>Nothing whatever?&nbsp; What they did not know was merely that
+Will gave them fair copies in his <a name="page259"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 259</span>own hand, as, before the typewriting
+machine was invented, authors were wont to do.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He and I were looking at some of Dickens&rsquo;s
+MSS.&nbsp; They were full of erasions and corrections.&nbsp; I
+said, &ldquo;How unlike Scott!&rdquo; whose first draft of his
+novels exactly answered to the players&rsquo; description of
+Will&rsquo;s &ldquo;copy.&rdquo;&nbsp; My friend said,
+&ldquo;Browning scarcely made an erasion or change in writing his
+poems,&rdquo; and referred to Mr. Browning&rsquo;s MSS. for the
+press, of which examples were lying near us.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+Browning must have made clean copies for the press,&rdquo; I
+said: which was as new an idea to my learned friend as it was
+undreamed of by the Players:&mdash;if what they received from him
+were his clean copies.</p>
+<p>The Players&rsquo; testimony, through Jonson, cannot be
+destroyed by the &ldquo;easy stratagem&rdquo; of Mr.
+Greenwood.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he
+constantly professes that he &ldquo;is not the advocate of
+Bacon&rsquo;s authorship.&rdquo;&nbsp; The author was some great
+man, as like Bacon as one pea to another.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio <a
+name="citation259a"></a><a href="#footnote259a"
+class="citation">[259a]</a> &ldquo;as a very special
+occasion.&rdquo;&nbsp; Well, it <i>was</i> a very special
+occasion; no literary occasion could be more
+&ldquo;special.&rdquo;&nbsp; Without the Folio, badly as it is <a
+name="page260"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 260</span>executed,
+we should perhaps never have had many of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays.&nbsp; The occasion was special in the highest degree.</p>
+<p>But, says Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;if we could only get to the
+back of Jonson&rsquo;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.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation260a"></a><a href="#footnote260a"
+class="citation">[260a]</a></p>
+<p>Ben was much in the habit of giving &ldquo;sendoffs&rdquo; of
+great eloquence to poetic &ldquo;ventures&rdquo; now
+forgotten.&nbsp; What could &ldquo;the efficient cause&rdquo; be
+in the case of the Folio?&nbsp; At once Mr. Greenwood has
+recourse to Bacon; he cannot, do what he will, keep Bacon
+&ldquo;out of the Memorial.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben was with Bacon at
+Gorhambury, on Bacon&rsquo;s sixtieth birthday (January 22,
+1621).&nbsp; Ben wrote verses about the Genius of the old
+house,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Thou stand&rsquo;st as if some mystery thou
+didst.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&ldquo;What was that &lsquo;mystery&rsquo;?&rdquo; asks Mr.
+Greenwood. <a name="citation260b"></a><a href="#footnote260b"
+class="citation">[260b]</a>&nbsp; What indeed?&nbsp; And what has
+all this to do with Ben&rsquo;s commendatory verses for the
+Folio, two years later?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood also surmises, as we
+have seen, <a name="citation260c"></a><a href="#footnote260c"
+class="citation">[260c]</a> that Jonson was with Bacon, helping
+to translate <i>The Advancement of Learning</i> in June,
+1623.</p>
+<p>Let us suppose that he was: what has that to do with
+Ben&rsquo;s verses for the Folio?&nbsp; Does Mr. <a
+name="page261"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 261</span>Greenwood
+mean to hint that <i>Bacon</i> was the &ldquo;efficient cause
+operating to induce&rdquo; Ben &ldquo;to give the best possible
+send-off&rdquo; to the Folio?&nbsp; One does not see what
+interest Bacon had in stimulating the enthusiasm of Ben, unless
+we accept Bacon as author of the plays, which Mr. Greenwood does
+not.&nbsp; If Mr. Greenwood thinks that Bacon was the author of
+the plays, then the facts are suitable to his belief.&nbsp; But
+if he does not,&mdash;&ldquo;I hold no brief for the
+Baconians,&rdquo; he says,&mdash;how is all this passage on
+Ben&rsquo;s visits to Bacon concerned with the subject in
+hand?</p>
+<p>Between the passage on some &ldquo;efficient cause&rdquo;
+&ldquo;at the back of Ben&rsquo;s mind,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation261a"></a><a href="#footnote261a"
+class="citation">[261a]</a> and the passage on Ben&rsquo;s visits
+to Bacon in 1621&ndash;3, <a name="citation261b"></a><a
+href="#footnote261b" class="citation">[261b]</a> six pages
+intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the
+&ldquo;efficient cause&rdquo; of Ben&rsquo;s verses of 1623, and
+his visits to Bacon in 1621&ndash;3.&nbsp; These intercalary
+pages are concerned with Ben&rsquo;s laudations of Bacon, by
+name, in his <i>Discoveries</i>.&nbsp; The first is entirely
+confined to praise of Bacon as an orator.&nbsp; Bacon is next
+mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as &ldquo;<i>he who hath
+filled up all numbers</i>, and performed that in our tongue which
+may be preferred or compared either to <i>insolent Greece or
+haughty Rome</i>,&rdquo; words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in
+the Folio verses.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson&rsquo;s Catalogue, to judge
+by the names he cites (More, <a name="page262"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 262</span>Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon,
+Sidney, Hooker, Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on),
+suggests that &ldquo;he is thinking mainly of wits and orators of
+his own and the preceding generation,&rdquo; not of poets
+specially.&nbsp; This is obvious; why should Ben name Shakespeare
+with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop Gardiner, Egerton,
+Sandys, and Savile?&nbsp; Yet &ldquo;it is remarkable that no
+mention should be made of the great dramatist.&rdquo;&nbsp; Where
+is Spenser named, or Beaumont, or Chaucer, with whom Ben ranked
+Shakespeare?&nbsp; Ben quoted of Bacon the line he wrote long
+before of Shakespeare as a poet, about &ldquo;insolent
+Greece,&rdquo; and all this is &ldquo;remarkable,&rdquo; and Mr.
+Greenwood finds it &ldquo;not surprising&rdquo; <a
+name="citation262a"></a><a href="#footnote262a"
+class="citation">[262a]</a> that the Baconians dwell on the
+&ldquo;extraordinary coincidence of expression,&rdquo; as if Ben
+were incapable of repeating a happy phrase from himself, and as
+if we should wonder at anything the Baconians may say or do.</p>
+<p>Another startling coincidence is that, in <i>Discoveries</i>,
+Ben said of Shakespeare &ldquo;his wit was in his own
+power,&rdquo; and wished that &ldquo;the rule of it had been so
+too.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of Bacon, Ben wrote, &ldquo;his language, where
+he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly
+censorious.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus Bacon <i>had</i> &ldquo;the rule of
+his own wit,&rdquo; Bacon &ldquo;<i>could</i> spare or pass by a
+jest,&rdquo; whereas Shakespeare apparently could not&mdash;so
+like were the two Dromios in this particular!&nbsp; Strong in
+these convincing arguments, <a name="page263"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 263</span>the Baconians ask (not so Mr.
+Greenwood, he is no Baconian), &ldquo;were there then <i>two</i>
+writers of whom this description was appropriate . . .
+?&rdquo;&nbsp; Was there only one, and was it of Bacon, under the
+name of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; that Ben wrote <i>De
+Shakespeare nostrati</i>?</p>
+<p>Read it again, substituting &ldquo;Bacon&rdquo; for
+&ldquo;Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember the
+players,&rdquo; and so on, and what has Bacon to do here?&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Sometimes it was necessary that <i>Bacon</i> should be
+stopped.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Many times <i>Bacon</i> fell into
+those things could not escape laughter,&rdquo; such as
+C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s supposed line, &ldquo;and such like, which
+were ridiculous.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Bacon</i> redeemed his
+vices with his virtues.&nbsp; There was ever more in <i>Bacon</i>
+to be praised than to be pardoned.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thus freely, according to the Baconians, speaks Ben of Bacon,
+whom he here styles &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;&mdash;Heaven knows
+why! while crediting him with the players as his friends.&nbsp;
+Ben could not think or speak thus of Bacon.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+occupies his space with these sagacities of the Baconians; one
+marvels why he takes the trouble.&nbsp; We are asked why Ben
+wrote so little and that so cool (&ldquo;I loved him on this side
+idolatry as much as any&rdquo;) about Shakespeare.&nbsp; Read
+through Ben&rsquo;s <i>Discoveries</i>: what has he to say about
+any one of his great contemporary dramatists, from Marlowe to
+Beaumont?&nbsp; He says nothing about any of them; though he had
+panegyrised them, as he panegyrised Beaumont, in verse.&nbsp; In
+his <a name="page264"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+264</span>prose <i>Discoveries</i> he speaks, among English
+dramatists, of Shakespeare alone.</p>
+<p>We are also asked by the Baconians to believe that his remarks
+on Bacon under the name of Shakespeare are really an addition to
+his more copious and infinitely more reverential observations on
+Bacon, named by his own name; &ldquo;I have and do reverence him
+for the greatness that was only proper to himself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Also (where Bacon is spoken of as Shakespeare) &ldquo;He redeemed
+his vices by his virtues.&nbsp; There was ever more in him to be
+praised than to be pardoned . . . Sometimes it was necessary that
+he should be stopped . . . Many times he fell into those things
+that could not escape laughter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous.&nbsp;
+The person spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians,
+and Mr. Greenwood sympathetically alludes to their ideas, <a
+name="citation264a"></a><a href="#footnote264a"
+class="citation">[264a]</a> which I cannot qualify in courteous
+terms.&nbsp; Baconians &ldquo;would, of course, explain the
+difficulty by saying that however sphinx-like were Jonson&rsquo;s
+utterances, he had clearly distinct in his own mind two different
+personages, viz. Shakspere the player, and Shakespeare the real
+author of the plays and poems, and that if in the perplexing
+passage quoted from the <i>Discoveries</i> he appears to confound
+one with the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had
+been imposed on him.&rdquo;&nbsp; They <i>would</i> say, they
+<i>do</i> say <a name="page265"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+265</span>all that.&nbsp; Ben is not to let out that Bacon is the
+author.&nbsp; So he tells us of Bacon that he often made himself
+ridiculous, and so forth,&mdash;but he <i>pretends</i> that he is
+speaking of Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the
+search for &ldquo;the efficient cause&rdquo; of Ben&rsquo;s
+panegyric (1623), in the Folio, on his Beloved Mr. William
+Shakespeare, and the discovery of Ben&rsquo;s visits to Bacon in
+1621&ndash;3.</p>
+<p>Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew
+the secret of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship, and, stimulated by his
+hospitality, applauded his works in the Folio, while, as he must
+not disclose the secret, he throughout speaks of Bacon as
+Shakespeare, puns on that name in the line about seeming
+&ldquo;to shake a lance,&rdquo; and salutes the Lord of
+Gorhambury as &ldquo;Sweet Swan of Avon&rdquo;?&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood cannot mean that; for he is not a Baconian.&nbsp; What
+<i>does</i> he mean?</p>
+<p>Put together his pages 483, 489&ndash;491.&nbsp; On the former
+we find how &ldquo;it would appear&rdquo; that Jonson thought the
+issue of the Folio (1623) &ldquo;a very special occasion,&rdquo;
+and that perhaps if we could only &ldquo;get to the back of his
+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.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then skip to pp.
+489&ndash;491, and you find very special occasions: Bacon&rsquo;s
+birthday feast with its &ldquo;mystery&rdquo;; Ben as one of
+Bacon&rsquo;s &ldquo;good pens,&rdquo; in 1623.&nbsp; <a
+name="page266"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 266</span>&ldquo;The
+best of these good pens, it seems, was Jonson.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation266a"></a><a href="#footnote266a"
+class="citation">[266a]</a>&nbsp; On what evidence does it
+&ldquo;seem&rdquo;?&nbsp; The opinion of Judge Webb.</p>
+<p>Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, &ldquo;the
+efficient cause operating to induce&rdquo; Ben &ldquo;to give the
+best possible send-off&rdquo; to the Folio?&nbsp; How could this
+be the &ldquo;efficient cause&rdquo; if Bacon were not the author
+of the plays?</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Stands as if some mystery he
+did.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were
+a man likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be
+elaborately false about the authorship of the Shakespearean
+plays, it is hopelessly impossible to bring the Baconians and Mr.
+Greenwood (who &ldquo;holds no brief for the Baconians&rdquo;) to
+my point of view.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood rides off thus&mdash;what
+the Baconians do is unimportant.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are
+justifiable, some that it is actually a duty to
+tell.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may be so; I pray that I may never tell any
+of them (or any more of them).</p>
+<p>Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever
+he plumply denied that he wrote the <i>Waverley</i> novels.&nbsp;
+I do not judge Sir Walter.&nbsp; Heaven forbid!&nbsp; But if, in
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s words, he, &ldquo;we are told, thought it
+perfectly justifiable for a writer who wished to preserve <a
+name="page267"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 267</span>his
+anonymity, to deny, when questioned, the authorship of a work,
+since the interrogator had no right to put such a question to
+him,&rdquo; <a name="citation267a"></a><a href="#footnote267a"
+class="citation">[267a]</a> I disagree with Sir Walter.&nbsp;
+Many other measures, in accordance with the conditions of each
+case, were open to him.&nbsp; Some are formulated by his own
+Bucklaw, in <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>, as regards questions
+about what occurred on his bridal night.&nbsp; Bucklaw would
+challenge the man, and cut the lady, who asked questions.&nbsp;
+But Scott&rsquo;s case, as cited, applies only to Bacon (or Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s Unknown), if <i>he</i> were asked whether or
+not he were the author of the plays.&nbsp; No idiot, at that
+date, was likely to put the question!&nbsp; But, if anyone did
+ask, Bacon must either evade, or deny, or tell the truth.</p>
+<p>On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or
+tell the truth.&nbsp; But the parallel of Scott is not applicable
+to any other person except to the author who wishes to preserve
+his anonymity, and is questioned.&nbsp; The parallel does not
+apply to Ben.&nbsp; <i>He</i> had not written the Shakespearean
+plays.&nbsp; Nobody was asking <i>him</i> if he had written
+them.&nbsp; If he knew that the author was Bacon, and knew it
+under pledge of secrecy, and was asked (<i>per impossibile</i>)
+&ldquo;Who wrote these plays?&rdquo; he had only to say,
+&ldquo;Look at the title-page.&rdquo;&nbsp; But no mortal was
+asking Ben the question.&nbsp; But we are to suppose that, in the
+panegyric and in <i>Discoveries</i>, Ben chooses to assert,
+first, that <a name="page268"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+268</span>Shakespeare was his Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon;
+and that he &ldquo;loved him, on this side idolatry, as much as
+any.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no evidence that he did love
+Shakespeare, except his own statement, when, according to the
+Baconians, he is really speaking of Bacon, and, according to Mr.
+Greenwood, of an unknown person, singularly like Bacon.&nbsp;
+Consequently, unless we can prove that Ben really loved the
+actor, he is telling a disgustingly hypocritical and wholly
+needless falsehood, both before and after the death of
+Bacon.&nbsp; To be silent about the authorship of a book, an
+authorship which is the secret of your friend and patron, is one
+thing and a blameless thing.&nbsp; All the friends, some twenty,
+to whom Scott confided the secret of his authorship were
+silent.&nbsp; But not one of them publicly averred that the
+author was their very dear friend, So-and-so, who was not Scott,
+and perhaps not their friend at all.&nbsp; That was Ben&rsquo;s
+line.&nbsp; Thus the parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood,
+twice, <a name="citation268a"></a><a href="#footnote268a"
+class="citation">[268a]</a> is no parallel.&nbsp; It has no kind
+of analogy with Ben&rsquo;s alleged falsehoods, so elaborate, so
+incomprehensible except by Baconians, and, if he did not love the
+actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably hypocritical, and open to
+instant detection.</p>
+<p>It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which
+Ben is charged.&nbsp; But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of
+writing his novels, <a name="page269"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 269</span>which, let us say, he signed
+&ldquo;James Hogg,&rdquo; and died without confessing his secret,
+and without taking his elaborate precautions for its preservation
+on record.</p>
+<p>Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott&rsquo;s secret, under
+vow of silence, and was determined to keep it at any cost.&nbsp;
+He therefore, writing after the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in
+Scott&rsquo;s lifetime, publishes verses declaring that Hogg was
+his &ldquo;beloved&rdquo; (an enormous fib), and that Hogg,
+&ldquo;Sweet Swan of Ettrick,&rdquo; was the author of the
+<i>Waverley</i> novels.</p>
+<p>To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott&rsquo;s
+death, leaves a note in prose to the effect that, while he loved
+Hogg on this side idolatry (again, a monstrous fable), he must
+confess that Hogg, author of the <i>Waverley</i> novels, often
+fell into things that were ridiculous; and often needed to have a
+stopper put on him for all these remarks.&nbsp; Lockhart, while
+speaking of Hogg, is thinking of Scott&mdash;and he makes the
+remarks solely to conceal Scott&rsquo;s authorship of the
+novels&mdash;of which, on the hypothesis, nobody suspected Scott
+to be the author.&nbsp; Lockhart must then have been what the
+Baconian Mr. Theobald calls Mr. Churton Collins, &ldquo;a
+measureless liar,&rdquo;&mdash;all for no reason.</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no
+parallel, of Scott&rsquo;s denying his own authorship, goes on,
+&ldquo;for all we know, Jonson might have seen nothing in the
+least objectionable <a name="page270"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 270</span>in the publication by some great
+personage of his dramatic works under a pseudonym&rdquo; (under
+another man&rsquo;s name really), &ldquo;even though that
+pseudonym led to a wrong conception as to the authorship; and
+that, if, being a friend of that great personage, and working in
+his service&rdquo; (Ben worked, by the theory, in Bacon&rsquo;s),
+&ldquo;he had solemnly engaged to preserve the secret inviolate,
+and not to reveal it even to posterity, then <i>doubtless</i>
+(&lsquo;I thank thee, Jew&rsquo; (meaning Sir Sidney Lee),
+&lsquo;for teaching me that word&rsquo;!) he would have remained
+true to that solemn pledge.&rdquo; <a name="citation270a"></a><a
+href="#footnote270a" class="citation">[270a]</a></p>
+<p>To remain &ldquo;true,&rdquo; Ben had only to hold his
+peace.&nbsp; But he lied up and down, and right and left, and
+even declared that Bacon was a friend of the players, and needed
+to be shut up, and made himself a laughing-stock in his
+plays,&mdash;styling Bacon &ldquo;Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; All
+this, and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe
+before we can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines
+can we get rid of Ben Jonson&rsquo;s testimony to the authorship
+of Will Shakspere, Gent.</p>
+<h2><a name="page271"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+271</span>XIII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Let</span> us now examine a miracle and
+mystery in which the Baconians find nothing strange; nothing that
+is not perfectly normal.&nbsp; Bacon was the author of the
+Shakespearean plays, they tell us.&nbsp; Let us look rapidly at
+his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic
+supremacy, and imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous,
+when we consider his occupations and his ruling passion?</p>
+<p>Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware
+of it, and had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to
+do.&nbsp; While still at Cambridge, and therefore before he was
+fifteen, he was utterly dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr.
+Rawley, with the scientific doctrines of the Schools.&nbsp; In
+the study of nature they reasoned from certain accepted ideas,
+<i>a priori</i> principles, not from what he came to call
+&ldquo;interrogation of Nature.&rdquo;&nbsp; There were, indeed,
+and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school
+doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing.&nbsp;
+As Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, &ldquo;If
+our study of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be
+wrong; <a name="page274"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+274</span>might not a better method be found? . . .&nbsp; Upon
+the conviction &lsquo;This may be done,&rsquo; followed at once
+the question, <i>How</i> may it be done?&nbsp; Upon that question
+answered followed the resolution to try and do it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon,
+&ldquo;the event which had a greater influence than any other
+upon his character and future course.&nbsp; From that moment he
+had a vocation which employed and stimulated him . . . an object
+to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the human race;
+an idea to live in vast and lofty enough to fill the soul for
+ever with religious and heroic aspirations.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation274a"></a><a href="#footnote274a"
+class="citation">[274a]</a>&nbsp; The vocation, the idea, the
+object, were not poetical.</p>
+<p>In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon
+was much concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at
+stake in France, and supposed to be in danger at home), and with
+the good government of his native country.&nbsp; He could only
+aid that cause by the favour of Elizabeth and James; by his
+services in Parliament, where, despite his desire for
+advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen.&nbsp; He was
+obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and
+polemical literature, as were set him by people in power.&nbsp;
+With these three great objects filling his heart, inspiring his
+ambition, and occupying his energies and time, we cannot <a
+name="page275"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 275</span>easily
+believe, without direct external evidence, that he, or any
+mortal, could have leisure and detachment from his main objects
+(to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient to enable
+him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.</p>
+<p>Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might
+have penned sonnets to his mistress&rsquo;s eyebrow, he reports
+that he wrote &ldquo;his first essay on the Instauration of
+Philosophy, which he called <i>Temporis Partus Maximus</i>,
+&lsquo;The Greatest Birth of Time,&rsquo;&rdquo; and &ldquo;we
+need not doubt that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to
+do.&rdquo; <a name="citation275a"></a><a href="#footnote275a"
+class="citation">[275a]</a>&nbsp; For the Baconians take Bacon to
+have been a very great lawyer (of which I am no judge), and Law
+is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man&rsquo;s hours.&nbsp; In
+1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything very
+important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long
+pamphlet, &ldquo;Touching the Controversies of the Church of
+England.&rdquo; <a name="citation275b"></a><a
+href="#footnote275b" class="citation">[275b]</a>&nbsp; He had
+then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the
+stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is
+no proof that he wrote <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost</i>!&nbsp; By 1591&ndash;2, we learn much of him from his
+letter to Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he
+could meditate his philosophy.&nbsp; He was apparently hard at
+scientific work.&nbsp; &ldquo;I account my ordinary course of
+study <a name="page276"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+276</span>and meditation to be more painful than most parts of
+action are.&rdquo;&nbsp; He adds, &ldquo;The contemplative planet
+carries me away wholly,&rdquo; and by contemplation I conceive
+him to mean what he calls &ldquo;vast contemplative
+ends.&rdquo;&nbsp; These he proceeds to describe: he does
+<i>not</i> mean the writing of <i>Venus and Adonis</i> (1593),
+nor of <i>Lucrece</i> (1594), nor of comedies!&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+have taken all knowledge to be my province,&rdquo; and he recurs
+to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof
+the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and
+verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular
+traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope
+I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions,
+and profitable inventions and discoveries . . . This, whether it
+be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it
+favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot
+be removed.&rdquo;&nbsp; If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if
+he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like
+Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, &ldquo; . . . and become some
+sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . .
+&rdquo; <a name="citation276a"></a><a href="#footnote276a"
+class="citation">[276a]</a>&nbsp; Really, from first to last he
+was the prince of begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for
+place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.</p>
+<p>Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as <a
+name="page277"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 277</span>young at
+heart as Shelley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil,
+&ldquo;my Lord Treasurer Burghley.&rdquo;&nbsp; What did Cecil
+care for his youngish kinsman&rsquo;s philanthropy, and
+&ldquo;vast speculative ends&rdquo; (how <i>modern</i> it all
+is!), and the rest of it?&nbsp; But just because Bacon, at
+thirty-one, <i>is</i> so extremely &ldquo;green,&rdquo; going to
+&ldquo;take all knowledge for his province&rdquo; (if some one
+will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive that
+he was in earnest about his reformation of science.&nbsp; Surely
+no Baconian will deny it!&nbsp; Being so deeply in earnest,
+taking his &ldquo;study and meditation&rdquo; so hard, I cannot
+see him as the author of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, and whatever
+plays of the period,&mdash;say, <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s
+Lost</i>, <i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>, <i>Henry VI</i>,
+Part I,&mdash;are attributed to him, about this time, by
+Baconians.&nbsp; Of course my view is merely personal or
+&ldquo;subjective.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Baconians&rsquo; view is also
+&ldquo;subjective.&rdquo;&nbsp; I regard Bacon, in 1591, and
+later, as intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative
+aims:&mdash;what he says that he desires to do, in science, is
+what he <i>did</i>, as far as he was able.&nbsp; His other
+desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct
+of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the
+public profit.&nbsp; There seems to be no room left, no
+inclination left, for competition in their own line with Marlowe,
+Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights: no
+room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant
+actor.</p>
+<p><a name="page278"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 278</span>You
+see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do.&nbsp; Argument
+is unavailing.&nbsp; I take Bacon to have been sincere in his
+effusive letter to Cecil.&nbsp; Not so the Baconians; he
+concealed, they think, a vast <i>literary</i> aim.&nbsp; They
+must take his alternative&mdash;to be &ldquo;some sorry
+bookmaker, <i>or</i> a pioneer in that mine of truth,&rdquo; as
+meaning that he would either be the literary hack of a company of
+players, <i>or</i> the founder of a regenerating
+philosophy.&nbsp; But, at that date, playwrights could not well
+be called &ldquo;bookmakers,&rdquo; for the owners of the plays
+did their best to keep them from appearing as printed
+books.&nbsp; If Bacon by &ldquo;bookmaker&rdquo; meant
+&ldquo;playwright,&rdquo; he put a modest value on his poetical
+work!</p>
+<p>Meanwhile (1591&ndash;2), Bacon attached himself to the young,
+beautiful, and famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and
+gave him much excellent advice, as he always did, and, as always,
+his advice was not taken.&nbsp; It is not a novel suggestion,
+that Essex is the young man to whom Bacon is so passionately
+attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed to
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; &ldquo;I applied myself to him&rdquo; (that
+is, to Essex), says Bacon, &ldquo;in a manner which, I think,
+happeneth rarely among men.&rdquo;&nbsp; The poet of the Sonnets
+applies himself to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily)
+&ldquo;happeneth rarely among men.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon&rsquo;s
+life.&nbsp; But, if you pursue the context of what Bacon says
+concerning Essex, you find that he <a name="page279"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 279</span>does not speak <i>openly</i> of a
+tenderly passionate attachment to that young man; not more than
+<i>this</i>, &ldquo;I did nothing but advise and ruminate with
+myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and
+memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship&rsquo;s
+honour, fortune, or service.&rdquo; <a name="citation279a"></a><a
+href="#footnote279a" class="citation">[279a]</a>&nbsp; As Bacon
+did nothing but these things (1591&ndash;2), he had no great
+leisure for writing poetry and plays.&nbsp; Moreover, speaking as
+a poet, in the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his
+intense amatory devotion to Essex into the symbolism of his
+passionate verse.&nbsp; <i>Was Essex then a married
+man</i>?&nbsp; If so, the Sonneteer&rsquo;s insistence on his
+marrying must be symbolical of&mdash;anything else you
+please.</p>
+<p>We know that Bacon, at this period, &ldquo;did nothing&rdquo;
+but &ldquo;ruminate&rdquo; about Essex.&nbsp; The words are his
+own! (1604).&nbsp; No plays, no <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, nothing
+but enthusiastic service of Essex and the Sonnets.&nbsp; Mr.
+Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Essex
+(November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed such matter as
+&ldquo;Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge&rdquo; (containing his
+usual views about regenerating science), and &ldquo;Mr.
+Bacon&rsquo;s Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation279b"></a><a href="#footnote279b"
+class="citation">[279b]</a>&nbsp; Both are excellent, though, for
+a Court festival, not very gay.</p>
+<p>He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer <a
+name="page280"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 280</span>to Father
+Parson&rsquo;s (?) famous indictment of Elizabeth&rsquo;s
+Government, in <i>Observations on a Libel</i>. <a
+name="citation280a"></a><a href="#footnote280a"
+class="citation">[280a]</a>&nbsp; What with ruminating on Essex,
+and this essay, he was not solely devoted to <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i> and to furbishing-up old plays, though, no doubt, he
+<i>may</i> have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged
+his luscious imaginations in <i>Venus and Adonis</i>.&nbsp; I
+would not limit the potentialities of his genius.&nbsp; But,
+certainly, this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than
+poetry; not to mention his severe &ldquo;study and
+meditation&rdquo; on science.</p>
+<p>All these activities of Bacon, in the year of <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i>, do not exhaust his exercises.&nbsp; Bacon, living
+laborious days, plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply
+and fell into Elizabeth&rsquo;s disgrace, and vainly competed
+with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship, and went on to write a
+pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the
+office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex&rsquo;s affairs, to
+plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit
+for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of
+&ldquo;Formularies and Elegancies&rdquo; (January 1595), to write
+his Essays, to try for the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle
+with the affairs of the doomed Essex (1600&ndash;1), while always
+&ldquo;labouring in secret&rdquo; at that vast aim of the
+reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, <a
+name="page281"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 281</span>he says,
+and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs
+of State. <a name="citation281a"></a><a href="#footnote281a"
+class="citation">[281a]</a>&nbsp; Of these State affairs the
+projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous.&nbsp; He was
+also writing <i>The Advancement of Learning</i> (1605).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I do confess,&rdquo; he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley,
+&ldquo;since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect
+been absent from that I have done.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation281b"></a><a href="#footnote281b"
+class="citation">[281b]</a>&nbsp; His mind was with his beloved
+Reformation of Learning: this came between him and his legal, his
+political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his private schemes
+and suits.&nbsp; To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the
+vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, and the
+inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.&nbsp; Even without
+this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful
+enough, but with it&mdash;he needs the sturdy faith of the
+Rationalist to accept him and his plot&mdash;to write plays under
+the pseudonym of &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Talk of miracles as things which do not happen!&nbsp; The
+activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that
+man&rsquo;s mind and heart,&mdash;especially his heart, when we
+remember that he had to prosecute his passionately adored Essex
+to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as
+Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at
+least a hundred and six, if not much older.&nbsp; No wonder that
+he turned to <a name="page282"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+282</span>tragedy, <i>Lear</i>, <i>Macbeth</i>, <i>Othello</i>,
+and saw life <i>en noir</i>: man delighted him not, nor woman
+either.</p>
+<p>The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation
+of Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical
+impossibility.&nbsp; But they make it an intellectual
+miracle.&nbsp; Perhaps I may be allowed to set off this marvel
+against that other portent, Will Shakspere&rsquo;s knowledge and
+frequent use of terms of Law. <a name="citation282a"></a><a
+href="#footnote282a" class="citation">[282a]</a>&nbsp; I do not
+pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip of
+his pen.&nbsp; Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by
+Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the
+author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice an
+accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these
+mysterious productions.&nbsp; (But why was Bacon so wofully
+inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)</p>
+<p>By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon
+(not Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the
+Dedication of the Folio. <a name="citation282b"></a><a
+href="#footnote282b" class="citation">[282b]</a>&nbsp; &ldquo;If
+it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays, he
+would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the
+Folio, and the style of it&rdquo; (stuffed with terms of law)
+&ldquo;would be accounted for.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood thinks
+that Jonson wrote the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using
+legal terms in literature.&nbsp; &ldquo;Legal terms abounded in
+all plays <a name="page283"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+283</span>and poems of the period,&rdquo; says Sir Sidney Lee,
+and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word &ldquo;all.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation283a"></a><a href="#footnote283a"
+class="citation">[283a]</a>&nbsp; However he says, &ldquo;We must
+admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in
+lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan period&mdash;in
+sonnets for example, where it seems to us
+intolerable.&rdquo;&nbsp; Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes.
+<a name="citation283b"></a><a href="#footnote283b"
+class="citation">[283b]</a>&nbsp; The lawyers all agree, however,
+that Shakespeare does the legal style &ldquo;more natural,&rdquo;
+and more accurately than the rest.&nbsp; And yet I cannot even
+argue that, if he did use legal terms at all, he would be sure to
+do it pretty well.</p>
+<p>For on this point of Will&rsquo;s use of legal phraseology I
+frankly profess myself entirely at a loss.&nbsp; To use it in
+poetry was part of the worse side of taste at that period.&nbsp;
+The lawyers with one voice declare that Will&rsquo;s use of it is
+copious and correct, and that their &ldquo;mystery&rdquo; is
+difficult, their jargon hard to master; &ldquo;there is nothing
+so dangerous,&rdquo; wrote Lord Campbell, &ldquo;as for one not
+of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.&rdquo;&nbsp; I have
+not tampered with it.&nbsp; Perhaps a man of genius who found it
+interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily
+than lawyers deem possible.&nbsp; But Will, so accurate in his
+legal terms, is so inaccurate on many other points; for example,
+in civil and natural history, and in classic lore.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood proves him to be totally at sea as a naturalist.&nbsp;
+On the habits of bees, for <a name="page284"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 284</span>example, &ldquo;his natural history
+of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation284a"></a><a href="#footnote284a"
+class="citation">[284a]</a>&nbsp; Virgil, though not a Lord
+Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will.&nbsp;
+About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed.&nbsp; His
+Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great
+medi&aelig;val storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of
+Pliny.&nbsp; &ldquo;He went to contemporary error or antiquated
+fancy for his facts, not to nature,&rdquo; says a critic quoted
+by Mr. Greenwood. <a name="citation284b"></a><a
+href="#footnote284b" class="citation">[284b]</a>&nbsp; Was that
+worthy of Bacon?</p>
+<p>All these charges against <i>le vieux Williams</i> (as
+Th&eacute;ophile Gautier calls our Will) I admit.&nbsp; But Will
+was no Bacon; Will had not &ldquo;taken all knowledge for his
+province.&rdquo;&nbsp; Bacon, I hope, had not neglected
+Bees!&nbsp; Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal
+terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity, in history, in
+classic matters, is not by me to be solved.&nbsp; I can only
+surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason, he
+had read law-books, or drawn information from Templars about the
+meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically
+accurate.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and
+Anti-Willian arguments against Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+authorship of the plays and <a name="page285"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 285</span>poems.&nbsp; Their chief argument
+for Bacon is <i>aut Diabolus</i>, <i>aut Franciscus</i>, which,
+freely interpreted, means, &ldquo;If Bacon is not the author, who
+the devil is?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the
+works are attributed by every voice of his own generation which
+mentions them, namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from
+1593 to the early years of the second decade of the following
+century, held a prominent place in the world of the drama.&nbsp;
+His authorship is explicitly vouched for by his fellow-players,
+Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his will; and by
+his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben Jonson;
+Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one
+of Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;hands,&rdquo; and lived into the Great
+Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within,
+and <i>his</i> &ldquo;mellifluous Shakespeare&rdquo; is
+&ldquo;Will,&rdquo; as his Beaumont was &ldquo;Frank,&rdquo; his
+Marlowe &ldquo;Kit,&rdquo; his Fletcher,
+&ldquo;Jack.&rdquo;&nbsp; The author of <i>Daiphantus</i> (1604),
+mentioning the popularity of <i>Hamlet</i>, styles it &ldquo;one
+of friendly Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and
+friendly character.&nbsp; The other authors of allusions did not
+need to say <i>who</i> their &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; was, any
+more than they needed to say <i>who</i> Marlowe or any other poet
+was.&nbsp; We have examined the possibly unprecedented argument
+which demands that they who mention Shakespeare <a
+name="page286"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 286</span>as the poet
+must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also
+the actor.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;But all may have been deceived&rdquo; by the long
+conspiracy of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One.&nbsp; To
+believe this possible, considering the eager and suspicious
+jealousy and volubility of rival playwrights, is to be credulous
+indeed.&nbsp; The Baconians, representing Will almost as
+incapable of the use of pen and ink as &ldquo;the old hermit of
+Prague,&rdquo; destroy their own case.&nbsp; A Will who had to
+make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even
+to the call-boy of his company.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+bookless Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of
+&ldquo;bumbasting out a blank verse,&rdquo; is a rather less
+impossible pretender, indeed; but why and when did the speaker of
+patois, the bookless one, write blank verse, from 1592 onwards,
+and where are his blank verses?&nbsp; Where are the
+&ldquo;works&rdquo; of Poet-Ape?&nbsp; As to the man, even Will
+by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was &ldquo;a handsome,
+well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and
+pleasant, smooth wit.&rdquo;&nbsp; To his fellow-actors he was
+&ldquo;so worthy a friend and fellow&rdquo; (associate).&nbsp; To
+Jonson, &ldquo;he was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free
+nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
+expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that sometimes it was
+necessary he should be stopped.&rdquo;&nbsp; If Jonson here
+refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that
+extraordinary affluence <a name="page287"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 287</span>of thoughts, each mating itself with
+as remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is
+so characteristic of the style of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays.&nbsp; In this prodigality he was remote indeed from the
+style of the Greeks; &ldquo;panting Time toils after him in
+vain,&rdquo; and even the reader, much more the listener, might
+say, <i>sufflaminandus est</i>; &ldquo;he needs to have the brake
+put on.&rdquo; <a name="citation287a"></a><a href="#footnote287a"
+class="citation">[287a]</a></p>
+<p>Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will.&nbsp;
+Only despair can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name
+of Shakespeare, Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as &ldquo;falling
+into those things which could not escape laughter . . . which
+were ridiculous.&rdquo;&nbsp; But to this last poor shift and
+fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and Baconians reduced.</p>
+<p>Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.</p>
+<p>But it is &ldquo;impossible&rdquo; that a man should have
+known so much, especially of classical literature and courtly
+ways, and foreign manners and phrases, if he had no more, at
+most, than four or five years at a Latin school, and five or six
+years in that forcing-house of faculty, the London of the stage,
+in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite
+fardles of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops
+stuffed, and every <a name="page288"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+288</span>study furnished,&rdquo; says a contemporary. <a
+name="citation288a"></a><a href="#footnote288a"
+class="citation">[288a]</a>&nbsp; If a doubter will look at the
+cheap and common books of that day (a play in quarto, and the
+Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold for fippence) in any
+great collection; he will not marvel that to a lover of books,
+poor as he might be, many were accessible.&nbsp; Such a man
+cannot be kept from books.</p>
+<p>If the reader will look into &ldquo;the translations and
+imitations of the classics which poured from the press . . . the
+poems and love-pamphlets and plays of the University wits&rdquo;
+(when these chanced to be printed), &ldquo;the tracts and
+dialogues in the prevailing taste,&rdquo; <a
+name="citation288b"></a><a href="#footnote288b"
+class="citation">[288b]</a> he will understand the literary soil
+in which the genius of Shakespeare blossomed as rapidly as the
+flowers in &ldquo;Adonis&rsquo; garden.&rdquo;&nbsp; The whole
+literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated
+with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic <i>dicta</i>&mdash;a
+world of knowledge of a kind then &ldquo;in widest commonalty
+spread,&rdquo; but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and
+the public, such lore seems recondite learning.</p>
+<p>The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits
+as could get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to
+&ldquo;dispute their way through Europe,&rdquo; made the Italian
+tour, and, notoriously, were &ldquo;Italianate.&rdquo;&nbsp; They
+would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and <a
+name="page289"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 289</span>Rome.&nbsp;
+Actors visited Denmark and Germany.&nbsp; No man at home was far
+to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian
+&ldquo;tranect or common ferry,&rdquo; the gondolas, and the
+Rialto.&nbsp; There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble
+from the foreign wars.&nbsp; Only dullards, or the unthinking,
+can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man,
+having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in
+French, Italian, or Spanish.&nbsp; That Shakespeare was the very
+reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by
+the fact that he was thought capable of his works.&nbsp; For
+courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly&rsquo;s
+Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in
+the houses of the great.&nbsp; As to untaught nobility of
+manners, there came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small
+pig-breeding village on the marches of Lorraine, one whose
+manners were deemed of exquisite grace, propriety, and charm, by
+all who saw and heard her: of her manners and swift wit and
+repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant
+evidence.&nbsp; Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the
+historic record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius,
+Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ne me dites jamais cette b&ecirc;te de mot</i>,
+<i>impossible</i>,&rdquo; said Napoleon: it is indeed a stupid
+word where genius is concerned.</p>
+<p>If intellectual &ldquo;miracles&rdquo; were impossible to
+genius, even Bacon could not have been and <a
+name="page290"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 290</span>done all
+that he was and did, and also the author of the Shakespearean
+plays and poems; even Ben could not have been the scholar that he
+was.&nbsp; For the rest, I need not return on my tracks and
+explain once more such shallow mysteries as the &ldquo;Silence of
+Philip Henslowe,&rdquo; and the lack of literary anecdotage about
+Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town.&nbsp; Had
+Will, not Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have
+matter enough of the kind desired.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We have the epics of Homer,&rdquo; people say,
+&ldquo;what matters it whether they be by a Man, or by a
+Syndicate that was in business through seven centuries?&nbsp; We
+have the plays of Shakespeare, what matters it whether he, or
+Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic
+pedantries, such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while
+we wish to give love and praise and gratitude where they are due;
+to that Ach&aelig;an &ldquo;Father of the rest&rdquo;; and to
+&ldquo;friendly Shakespeare.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page291"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+291</span>APPENDICES</h2>
+<h3><a name="page293"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+293</span>APPENDIX I<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">&ldquo;TROILUS AND
+CRESSIDA&rdquo;</span></h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">To</span> myself <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i> is, with <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I, the most
+mysterious among the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; Here we find, if
+Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the
+modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the
+ancient world; but the English author&rsquo;s eyes are dimmed by
+the mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of
+Troy.&nbsp; The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth
+century before our era, when, by the author of the <i>Cypria</i>,
+these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were
+represented as scoundrels, assassins, and cowards.</p>
+<p>In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that
+the writer is no scholar.&nbsp; He makes the Ach&aelig;an fleet
+muster in &ldquo;the port of <i>Athens</i>,&rdquo; of all
+places.&nbsp; Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-place, Aulis,
+in B&oelig;otia.&nbsp; (This Prologue is not in the Folio of
+1623.)&nbsp; Six gates hath the Englishman&rsquo;s Troy, and the
+Sc&aelig;an is not one of them.</p>
+<p>The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as
+go-between, are from the medi&aelig;val Troy books, and were
+wholly unknown to Homer, whose Pandarus is only notable for
+loosing a <a name="page294"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+294</span>traitor&rsquo;s shaft at Menelaus, in time of truce,
+and for his death at the hand of Diomede.&nbsp; The play begins
+after the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus: in the
+play, not in Homer, Paris &ldquo;retires hurt,&rdquo; as is at
+first reported.&nbsp; Hector has a special grudge against the
+Telamonian Aias.&nbsp; As in the Iliad there is a view of the
+Ach&aelig;ans, taken from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in
+the play, Pandarus and Cressida review the Trojans re-entering
+the city.&nbsp; Paris turns out not to be hurt after all.</p>
+<p>In Act i. Scene 3, the Ach&aelig;ans hold council, and regret
+the disaffection of Achilles.&nbsp; Here comes Ulysses&rsquo;
+great speech on discipline, in armies, and in states, the
+gradations of rank and duty; commonly thought to be a leaf in
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s crown of bays.&nbsp; The speeches of
+Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats
+Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do.&nbsp; But
+the poet represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at
+Patroclus&rsquo;s imitation of the cough and other infirmities of
+old Nestor, to which Homer, naturally, never alludes.&nbsp;
+Throughout, the English poet regards Achilles with the eyes of
+his most infamous late Greek and ignorant medi&aelig;val
+detractors.&nbsp; The Homeric sequence of events is so far
+preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and
+Menelaus, comes (through &AElig;neas) the challenge by Hector to
+fight any Greek in &ldquo;gentle and joyous passage of
+arms&rdquo; (Iliad, VII).&nbsp; As in the Iliad, the Greeks
+decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by the contrivance of
+Odysseus <a name="page295"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+295</span>(not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on
+Aias.&nbsp; In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as
+Porthos in <i>Les Trois Mousquetaires</i>.&nbsp; The play makes
+him as great an eater of beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew
+Aguecheek.&nbsp; Achilles, save in a passage quite out of accord
+with the rest of the piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is
+discourteous, and is cowardly!&nbsp; No poet and no scholar who
+knew Homer&rsquo;s heroes in Homer&rsquo;s Greek, could thus
+degrade them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites are
+loathsome in their profusion of filthy thoughts.&nbsp; It does
+not follow that Will did not write the part of Thersites.&nbsp;
+Some of the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse
+adorn the play; one would say that no man but Will could have
+written them.&nbsp; Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear
+&ldquo;to dally with the innocence of love&rdquo;; and nothing
+can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines in which Cressida,
+compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek camp, in
+exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.&nbsp; But
+the Homeric and the alien later elements,&mdash;the story of
+false love,&mdash;cannot be successfully combined.&nbsp; The
+poet, whoever he was, appears to weary and to break down.&nbsp;
+He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the death of Hector, but
+Hector, in the play, is murdered, while resting unarmed, without
+shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of sumptuous mail from
+a nameless runaway.&nbsp; In the play he has slain Patroclus, but
+has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which, in Homer,
+he is wearing.&nbsp; Achilles then meets Hector, but far from
+rushing <a name="page296"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+296</span>to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward,
+musters his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless
+Hector.</p>
+<p>Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek
+camp, in a day becomes &ldquo;the sluttish spoil of
+opportunity,&rdquo; and of Diomede, and the comedy praised by the
+preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking
+of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o&rsquo; love, and the base
+victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector.&nbsp; Yet there
+seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and broken lights from
+the splendour of Homer.&nbsp; When Achilles eyes Hector all over,
+during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking in what
+part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of
+Iliad, XXII, 320&ndash;326, where Achilles searches his own
+armour, worn by Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn
+by Hector, for a chink in the mail.&nbsp; Yet, after all, these
+points are taken, not from the Iliad, but from Caxton&rsquo;s
+popular Troy Book.</p>
+<p>Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men
+to</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;cry amain,<br />
+Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>we think of Iliad, XXII, 390&ndash;393, where Achilles
+commands the Myrmidons to go singing the p&aelig;an</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Glory have we won, we have slain great
+Hector!&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man,
+recalls his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus.&nbsp;
+But, in fact, this passage is also borrowed, with the murder <a
+name="page297"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 297</span>of Hector,
+from Caxton, except as regards the p&aelig;an.</p>
+<p>It may be worth noting that Chapman&rsquo;s first instalment
+of his translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and
+VII&ndash;XI, appeared in 1598, and thence the author could adapt
+the passages from Iliad, Book VII.&nbsp; In or about 1598&ndash;9
+occurred, in <i>Histriomastix</i>, by Marston and others, a
+burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing Cressida, speaks of
+&ldquo;thy knight,&rdquo; who &ldquo;<i>Shakes</i> his furious
+<i>Speare</i>,&rdquo; while in April 1599, Henslowe&rsquo;s
+account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and Chettle
+for a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of
+Nottingham&rsquo;s Company. <a name="citation297a"></a><a
+href="#footnote297a" class="citation">[297a]</a>&nbsp; Of this
+play no more is known, nor can we be sure that Chapman&rsquo;s
+seven Books of the Iliad (I, II, VII&ndash;XI) of 1598 attracted
+the attention of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and
+Dekker, to Trojan affairs.&nbsp; The coincidences at least are
+curious.&nbsp; If &ldquo;<i>Shakes</i> his furious
+<i>Speare</i>&rdquo; in <i>Histriomastix</i> refers to
+Shakespeare in connection with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker
+and Chettle were doing a <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> for a
+company not Shakespeare&rsquo;s, then there were <i>two Troilus
+and Cressida</i> in the field.&nbsp; A licence to print a
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i> was obtained in 1602&ndash;3, but the
+quarto of our play, the Shakespearean play, is of 1609, &ldquo;as
+it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s men,&rdquo; that is,
+by Shakespeare&rsquo;s Company.&nbsp; Now Dekker and Chettle
+wrote, apparently, for Lord Nottingham&rsquo;s Company.&nbsp; One
+quarto of 1609 declares, in a Preface, <a
+name="page298"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 298</span>that the
+play has &ldquo;never been staled with the stage&rdquo;; another
+edition of the same year, from the same publishers, has not the
+Preface, but declares that the piece &ldquo;was acted by the
+King&rsquo;s Majesty&rsquo;s servants <i>at the Globe</i>.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation298a"></a><a href="#footnote298a"
+class="citation">[298a]</a>&nbsp; The author of the Preface (Ben
+Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, <a name="citation298b"></a><a
+href="#footnote298b" class="citation">[298b]</a>) speaks only of
+a single author, who has written other admirable comedies.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;When he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will
+scramble for them, and set up a new English
+Inquisition.&rdquo;&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; The whole affair is a
+puzzle.&nbsp; But if the author of the Preface is right about the
+single author of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, and if Shakespeare
+is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in
+<i>Histriomastix</i> (1599), then it appears to me that
+Shakespeare, in 1598&ndash;9, after Chapman&rsquo;s portion of
+the Iliad appeared, was author of one <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>, extant in 1602&ndash;3 (when its publication was
+barred till the publisher &ldquo;got authority&rdquo;), while
+Chettle and Dekker, in April 1599, were busy with another
+<i>Troilus and Cressida</i>, as why should they not be?&nbsp; In
+an age so lax about copyright, if their play was of their own
+original making, are we to suppose that there was copyright in
+the names of the leading persons of the piece, Troilus and
+Cressida?</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p298b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"London in the year 1610, showing the Globe Theatre in the
+Foreground"
+title=
+"London in the year 1610, showing the Globe Theatre in the
+Foreground"
+ src="images/p298s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Perhaps not: but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge
+Stotsenburg&rsquo;s opinion <a name="citation298c"></a><a
+href="#footnote298c" class="citation">[298c]</a> that
+Henslowe&rsquo;s entries of April 1599 &ldquo;refute the
+Shakespearean claim to the authorship of <i>Troilus and
+Cressida</i>,&rdquo; which exhibits &ldquo;the collaboration <a
+name="page299"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 299</span>of two
+men,&rdquo; as &ldquo;leading commentators&rdquo; hold that it
+does.&nbsp; But the learned Judge mentions as a conceivable
+alternative that &ldquo;there were two plays on the subject with
+the same name,&rdquo; and, really, it looks as if there
+were!&nbsp; The Judge does not agree &ldquo;with Webb and other
+gifted writers that Bacon wrote this play.&rdquo;&nbsp; So far
+the Court is quite with him.&nbsp; He goes on however, &ldquo;It
+was, in my opinion, based on the foregoing facts, originally the
+production of Dekker and Chettle, added to and philosophically
+dressed by Francis Bacon.&rdquo;&nbsp; But, according to Mr.
+Greenwood, &ldquo;it is admitted not only that the different
+writing of two authors is apparent in the Folio play, but also
+that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; must have had at least some share
+in a play of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i> as early as the very
+year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker and Chettle are found
+engaged in writing their play of that name,&rdquo; on the
+evidence of <i>Histriomastix</i>. <a name="citation299a"></a><a
+href="#footnote299a" class="citation">[299a]</a>&nbsp; How that
+evidence proves that &ldquo;a play of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>
+had been <i>published</i> as by &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; about
+1599,&rdquo; I know not.&nbsp; Perhaps &ldquo;published&rdquo;
+means &ldquo;acted&rdquo;?&nbsp; &ldquo;And it is not
+unreasonable to suppose that this play&rdquo; (&ldquo;published
+as by Shakespeare&rdquo;) &ldquo;was the one to which Henslowe
+alludes&rdquo;&mdash;as being written in April 1599, by Dekker
+and Chettle.</p>
+<p>If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men,
+Dekker, Chettle, and &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; the Great
+Unknown, or Bacon.&nbsp; He collaborates with Dekker and Chettle,
+in a play <a name="page300"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+300</span>for Lord Nottingham&rsquo;s men (according to Sir
+Sidney Lee), <a name="citation300a"></a><a href="#footnote300a"
+class="citation">[300a]</a> but it is, later at least, played by
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s company; and perhaps Bacon gets none of the
+&pound;4 paid <a name="citation300b"></a><a href="#footnote300b"
+class="citation">[300b]</a> to Dekker and Chettle.&nbsp; Henslowe
+does not record his sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s or to any company or purchaser.&nbsp; Without
+an entry of the careful Henslowe recording his receipts for the
+sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser, it is not
+easy to see how Shakespeare&rsquo;s company procured the
+manuscript, and thus enabled him to refashion it.&nbsp; Perhaps
+no reader will fail to recognise his hand in the beautiful blank
+verse of many passages.&nbsp; I am not familiar enough with the
+works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable
+passages.&nbsp; Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo of Swift&rsquo;s
+might poison with such phrases as his the name and nature of
+love, loyalty, and military courage.&nbsp; But whatsoever
+Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man
+delighted him not, nor woman either, he may have written the
+whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim of &ldquo;a
+daughter of the game,&rdquo; and the knightly Hector is butchered
+to sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles.&nbsp; If Shakespeare
+read the books translated by Chapman, he must have read them in
+the same spirit as Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry
+of the Ach&aelig;an could not be combined with the Ionian,
+Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he <a
+name="page301"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 301</span>knew them
+in the medi&aelig;val books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate
+and Caxton.&nbsp; The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not
+follow.&nbsp; Probably Will looked on the play as one of his
+failures.&nbsp; The Editor, if we can speak of an Editor, of the
+Folio clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly that it is
+not paged, and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The Grand Possessors&rdquo; of the play referred to in
+the Preface to one of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to
+be Shakespeare&rsquo;s Company.&nbsp; In this case the owners
+would not permit the publication of the play if they could
+prevent it.&nbsp; The title provokes Mr. Greenwood to say,
+&ldquo;Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent;
+indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation301a"></a><a href="#footnote301a"
+class="citation">[301a]</a>&nbsp; Of course, if the players were
+the possessors, &ldquo;grand&rdquo; is merely a jeer, by a person
+advertising a successful piracy.&nbsp; And in regard to
+Tieck&rsquo;s conjecture that James I is alluded to as &ldquo;the
+grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly written,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation301b"></a><a href="#footnote301b"
+class="citation">[301b]</a> the autocratic James was very capable
+of protecting himself against larcenous publishers.</p>
+<h3><a name="page302"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+302</span>APPENDIX II<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">CHETTLE&rsquo;S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL
+SHAKSPERE</span></h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> discussing contemporary
+allusions to William Shakspere or Shakespeare (or however you
+spell the name), I have not relied on Chettle&rsquo;s remarks (in
+<i>Kind-Hart&rsquo;s Dreame</i>, 1592) concerning Greene&rsquo;s
+<i>Groatsworth of Wit</i>.&nbsp; Chettle speaks of it, saying,
+&ldquo;in which a letter, written to divers play-makers, is
+offensively by one or two of them taken.&rdquo;&nbsp; It appears
+that by &ldquo;one or two&rdquo; Chettle means <i>two</i>.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;With <i>neither</i> of them that take offence was I
+acquainted&rdquo; (at the time when he edited the
+<i>Groatsworth</i>), &ldquo;and with one of them I care not if I
+never be.&rdquo;&nbsp; We do not know who &ldquo;the Gentlemen
+his Quondam acquaintance,&rdquo; addressed by Greene, were.&nbsp;
+They are usually supposed to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge,
+or Nash.&nbsp; We do not know which of the two who take offence
+is the man with whom Chettle did not care to be acquainted.&nbsp;
+Of &ldquo;the other,&rdquo; according to Chettle, &ldquo;myself
+have seen his demeanour no less civil than he is excellent in the
+quality he professes&rdquo; (that is, &ldquo;in his
+profession,&rdquo; as we say), &ldquo;besides divers of worship
+have reported his uprightness of dealing, which <a
+name="page303"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 303</span>argues his
+honesty; and his facetious grace in writing that approves his
+art.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the
+person of whom he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and
+(<i>apparently</i>) that he is &ldquo;excellent in the quality he
+professes&rdquo;&mdash;in his profession.&nbsp; Speaking on the
+evidence of &ldquo;divers of worship,&rdquo; the same man is said
+to possess &ldquo;facetious grace in writing.&rdquo;&nbsp; Had
+his writings been then published, Chettle, a bookish man, would
+have read them and formed his own opinion.&nbsp; Works of Lodge,
+Peele, and Marlowe had been published.&nbsp; Writing is
+<i>not</i> &ldquo;the quality he professes,&rdquo; is not the
+&ldquo;profession&rdquo; of the man to whom Chettle refers.&nbsp;
+On the other hand, the profession of Greene&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Quondam acquaintance&rdquo; <i>was</i> writing,
+&ldquo;they spend their wits in making Plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus
+the man who wrote, but whose profession was not that of writing,
+does not, so far, appear to have been one of those addressed by
+Greene.&nbsp; It seems undeniable that Greene addresses gentlemen
+who are &ldquo;playmakers,&rdquo; who &ldquo;spend their wits in
+making Plays,&rdquo; and who are <i>not</i> actors; for
+Greene&rsquo;s purpose is to warn them against the rich,
+ungrateful actors.&nbsp; If Greene&rsquo;s friends, at the moment
+when he wrote, were, or if any one of them then was, by
+profession an actor, Greene&rsquo;s warning to him against
+actors, directed to an actor, is not, to me, intelligible.&nbsp;
+But Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;As I have shown, George Peele
+was one of the playwrights addressed by Greene, and Peele was a
+successful player as well as <a name="page304"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 304</span>playwright, and might quite truly
+have been alluded to both as having &lsquo;facetious grace in
+writing,&rsquo; and being &lsquo;excellent in the quality he
+professed,&rsquo; that is, as a professional actor.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation304a"></a><a href="#footnote304a"
+class="citation">[304a]</a></p>
+<p>I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of
+Oxford, had ever been a player, and a successful player.&nbsp;
+But one may ask,&mdash;in 1592 did George Peele &ldquo;profess
+the quality&rdquo; of an actor; was he then a professional actor,
+and only an occasional playwright?&nbsp; If so, I am not apt to
+believe that Greene seriously advised him not to put faith in the
+members of his own profession.&nbsp; From them, as a successful
+member of their profession (a profession which, as Greene
+complains, &ldquo;exploited&rdquo; dramatic authors), Peele stood
+in no danger.&nbsp; Thus I do not see how Chettle&rsquo;s
+professional actor, reported to have facetious grace in writing,
+can be identified with Peele.&nbsp; The identification seems to
+me impossible.&nbsp; Peele and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary
+gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering, though a literary
+man; he had not yet become a physician.&nbsp; In 1592, none of
+the three had any profession but that of literature, so far as I
+am aware.&nbsp; The man who had a special profession, and also
+wrote, was not one of these three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere
+literary gentleman, pamphleteer and playwright.</p>
+<p>I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene
+addressed the <i>Groatsworth</i>, though the atheistic writer of
+tragedies seems meant, and disgracefully meant, for
+Marlowe.&nbsp; <a name="page305"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+305</span>I only know that Chettle is expressing his regrets for
+Greene&rsquo;s language to some one whom he applauded as to his
+exercise of his profession; and who, according to &ldquo;divers
+of worship,&rdquo; had also &ldquo;facetious grace in
+writing.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Myself have seen him no less civil
+than he is excellent in the quality he professes&rdquo;; whether
+or not this means that Chettle has <i>seen</i> his excellence in
+his profession, I cannot tell for certain; but Chettle&rsquo;s
+remark is, at least, contrasted with what he gives merely from
+report&mdash;&ldquo;the facetious grace in writing&rdquo; of the
+man in question.&nbsp; <i>His</i> writing is not part of his
+profession, so he is not, in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge, Peele,
+Marlowe, or Nash.</p>
+<p>Who, then, is this mysterious personage?&nbsp; Malone, Dyce,
+Steevens, Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee,
+Messrs. Gosse and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is
+Will Shakspere.&nbsp; But Mr. Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose
+&ldquo;mind&rdquo; is &ldquo;legal,&rdquo; have pointed out that
+this weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere, if Greene
+meant Shakspere), attacked by Greene.&nbsp; For Chettle says that
+in the <i>Groatsworth of Wit</i> &ldquo;a letter, written to
+divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them
+taken.&rdquo;&nbsp; The mysterious one is, therefore, one of the
+playwrights addressed by Greene.&nbsp; Consequently all the
+followers of Malone, who wrote before Messrs. Fleay and Castle,
+are mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to say about Sir Sidney
+Lee, J. C. Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr. Gosse, in the way of
+moral reprobation, may be read by the curious in his pages. <a
+name="citation305a"></a><a href="#footnote305a"
+class="citation">[305a]</a></p>
+<p><a name="page306"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+306</span>Meanwhile, if we take Chettle to have been a strict
+grammarian, by his words&mdash;&ldquo;a letter, written to divers
+play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken,&rdquo;
+Will is excluded; the letter was most assuredly not written to
+<i>him</i>.&nbsp; But I, whose mind is not legal, am not certain
+that Chettle does not mean that the letter, written to divers
+play-makers, was by one or two makers of plays offensively
+taken.</p>
+<p>This opinion seems the less improbable, as the person to whom
+Chettle is most apologetic excels in a quality or profession,
+which is contrasted with, and is not identical with, &ldquo;his
+facetious grace in writing&rdquo;&mdash;a <i>parergon</i>, or
+&ldquo; bye-work,&rdquo; in his case.&nbsp; Whoever this person
+was, he certainly was not Marlowe, Peele, Lodge, or Nash.&nbsp;
+We must look for some other person who had a profession, and also
+was reported to have facetious grace in writing.</p>
+<p>If Chettle is to be held tight to grammar, Greene referred to
+some one unknown, some one who wrote for the stage, but had
+another profession.&nbsp; If Chettle is not to be thus tautly
+construed, I confess that to myself he seems to have had
+Shakspere, even Will, in his mind.&nbsp; For Will in 1592 had
+&ldquo;a quality which he professed,&rdquo; that of an actor; and
+also (I conceive) was reported to have &ldquo; facetious grace in
+writing.&rdquo;&nbsp; But other gentlemen may have combined these
+attributes; wherefore I lay no stress on the statements of
+Chettle, as if they referred to our Will Shakspere.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote0a"></a><a href="#citation0a"
+class="footnote">[0a]</a>&nbsp; E. J. Castle, <i>Shakespeare</i>,
+<i>Bacon</i>, <i>Jonson</i>, <i>and Greene</i>, pp.
+194&ndash;195.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0b"></a><a href="#citation0b"
+class="footnote">[0b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 145.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0c"></a><a href="#citation0c"
+class="footnote">[0c]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 340.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0d"></a><a href="#citation0d"
+class="footnote">[0d]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 340, 341.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0e"></a><a href="#citation0e"
+class="footnote">[0e]</a>&nbsp; <i>In Re Shakespeare</i>, p.
+54.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0f"></a><a href="#citation0f"
+class="footnote">[0f]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 341.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0g"></a><a href="#citation0g"
+class="footnote">[0g]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 470.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0h"></a><a href="#citation0h"
+class="footnote">[0h]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 339.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0i"></a><a href="#citation0i"
+class="footnote">[0i]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, pp. 115&ndash;116.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0j"></a><a href="#citation0j"
+class="footnote">[0j]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 49.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote0k"></a><a href="#citation0k"
+class="footnote">[0k]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 14.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a"
+class="footnote">[4a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Francis Bacon Wrote
+Shakespeare</i>.&nbsp; By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote7a"></a><a href="#citation7a"
+class="footnote">[7a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespere Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote11a"></a><a href="#citation11a"
+class="footnote">[11a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 31&ndash;37.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote13a"></a><a href="#citation13a"
+class="footnote">[13a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 36&ndash;37.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote16a"></a><a href="#citation16a"
+class="footnote">[16a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Tue Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 20.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17a"></a><a href="#citation17a"
+class="footnote">[17a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 47&ndash;48.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17b"></a><a href="#citation17b"
+class="footnote">[17b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+54&ndash;55.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17c"></a><a href="#citation17c"
+class="footnote">[17c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 54.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17d"></a><a href="#citation17d"
+class="footnote">[17d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 56.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17e"></a><a href="#citation17e"
+class="footnote">[17e]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 59.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17f"></a><a href="#citation17f"
+class="footnote">[17f]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 62.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote17g"></a><a href="#citation17g"
+class="footnote">[17g]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 193.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote18a"></a><a href="#citation18a"
+class="footnote">[18a]</a>&nbsp; See his <i>Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 210.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote19a"></a><a href="#citation19a"
+class="footnote">[19a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators</i>, p. 187.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote19b"></a><a href="#citation19b"
+class="footnote">[19b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 223.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote21a"></a><a href="#citation21a"
+class="footnote">[21a]</a>&nbsp; <i>In Re Shakespeare</i>, p.
+54.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote22a"></a><a href="#citation22a"
+class="footnote">[22a]</a>&nbsp; In a brief note of two pages
+(<i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, November 1911) he makes such reply as
+the space permits to a paper of my own, &ldquo;Shakespeare or
+X?&rdquo; in the September number.&nbsp; With my goodwill he
+might have written thirty-two pages to my sixteen, but I am not
+the Editor, and never heard of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s note till
+May 1912.</p>
+<p>He says that I had represented him as stating that the Unknown
+genius adopted the name of William Shake-speare or Shakespeare
+&ldquo;as a good <i>nom de guerre</i>, without any reference to
+the fact that there was an actor in existence of the name of
+William Shakspere, whose name was sometimes written Shakespeare,
+and without the least idea that the works he published under this
+pseudonym would be fathered upon the actor . . . &rdquo; (My
+meaning has obviously been too obscurely stated by me.)</p>
+<p>Mr. Greenwood next writes that the confusion between the
+actor, and the unknown taking the name William Shakespeare,
+&ldquo;did happen and was intended to happen.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><i>C&rsquo;est l&agrave; le miracle</i>!</p>
+<p>How could it happen if the actor were the bookless, ignorant
+man whom Mr. Greenwood describes?&nbsp; It could not happen: Will
+must have been unmasked in a day.&nbsp; The fact that a strange
+plot existed was only too obvious.&nbsp; The Unknown&rsquo;s
+secret must have been tracked by the hounds of keenest nose in
+the packs of rival and jealous authors and of actors.&nbsp; None
+gives tongue.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote27a"></a><a href="#citation27a"
+class="footnote">[27a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Francis Bacon Wrote
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 37.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote30a"></a><a href="#citation30a"
+class="footnote">[30a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 333.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote31a"></a><a href="#citation31a"
+class="footnote">[31a]</a>&nbsp; In the passage which I quoted,
+with notes of omission, from Mr. Greenwood (p. 333), he went on
+to say that the eulogies of the poet by &ldquo;some cultured
+critics of that day,&rdquo; &ldquo;afford no proof that the
+author who published under the name of Shakespeare was in reality
+Shakspere the Stratford player.&rdquo;&nbsp; That position I
+later contest.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote31b"></a><a href="#citation31b"
+class="footnote">[31b]</a>&nbsp; See chap. XI, <i>The First
+Folio</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote33a"></a><a href="#citation33a"
+class="footnote">[33a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 305, 306.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote34a"></a><a href="#citation34a"
+class="footnote">[34a]</a>&nbsp; Furness, <i>Merchant of
+Venice</i>, pp. 271, 272.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote34b"></a><a href="#citation34b"
+class="footnote">[34b]</a>&nbsp; On this see Mr. Pollard&rsquo;s
+<i>Shakespeare Folios and Quartos</i>, pp. 1&ndash;9.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote37a"></a><a href="#citation37a"
+class="footnote">[37a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 202, 348, 349.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote38a"></a><a href="#citation38a"
+class="footnote">[38a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 349.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote44a"></a><a href="#citation44a"
+class="footnote">[44a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote45a"></a><a href="#citation45a"
+class="footnote">[45a]</a>&nbsp; <i>In Re Shakespeare</i>, p. 88,
+note I.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote48a"></a><a href="#citation48a"
+class="footnote">[48a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 15; <i>Life of Shakespeare</i>, by Malone, pp. 561&ndash;2,
+564; Appendix, XI, xvi.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote50a"></a><a href="#citation50a"
+class="footnote">[50a]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp. 97, 98.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote51a"></a><a href="#citation51a"
+class="footnote">[51a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 44.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote52a"></a><a href="#citation52a"
+class="footnote">[52a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 39.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote52b"></a><a href="#citation52b"
+class="footnote">[52b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 210.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote53a"></a><a href="#citation53a"
+class="footnote">[53a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 187.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote53b"></a><a href="#citation53b"
+class="footnote">[53b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 223.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote55a"></a><a href="#citation55a"
+class="footnote">[55a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 69.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote56a"></a><a href="#citation56a"
+class="footnote">[56a]</a>&nbsp; See chapter X, <i>The
+Traditional Shakespeare</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote56b"></a><a href="#citation56b"
+class="footnote">[56b]</a>&nbsp; See C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp. 48,
+343&ndash;8.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote57a"></a><a href="#citation57a"
+class="footnote">[57a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 207&ndash;9.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote59a"></a><a href="#citation59a"
+class="footnote">[59a]</a>&nbsp; Chapter X, <i>infra.</i></p>
+<p><a name="footnote62a"></a><a href="#citation62a"
+class="footnote">[62a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 96.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote62b"></a><a href="#citation62b"
+class="footnote">[62b]</a>&nbsp; See chapter X, <i>The
+Traditional Shakespeare</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote62c"></a><a href="#citation62c"
+class="footnote">[62c]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 94&ndash;96.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote64a"></a><a href="#citation64a"
+class="footnote">[64a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare</i>, pp.
+38&ndash;40.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote65a"></a><a href="#citation65a"
+class="footnote">[65a]</a>&nbsp; Raleigh, <i>Shakespeare</i>, pp.
+77, 78.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote69a"></a><a href="#citation69a"
+class="footnote">[69a]</a>&nbsp; So he seems to me to do; but in
+<i>Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>, p. 135, he shows great
+caution: &ldquo;I refer the reader to Mr. Collin&rsquo;s essay,
+and ask him to judge for himself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote71a"></a><a href="#citation71a"
+class="footnote">[71a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 15.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote72a"></a><a href="#citation72a"
+class="footnote">[72a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 21.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote75a"></a><a href="#citation75a"
+class="footnote">[75a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Alcibiades</i>, I, pp. 132,
+133; <i>Troilus</i>, III, scene 3.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote77a"></a><a href="#citation77a"
+class="footnote">[77a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 46.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote77b"></a><a href="#citation77b"
+class="footnote">[77b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Iliad</i>, p. 63.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote91a"></a><a href="#citation91a"
+class="footnote">[91a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 54, 55.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote93a"></a><a href="#citation93a"
+class="footnote">[93a]</a>&nbsp; <i>National Review</i>, vol.
+xxxix., 1902.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote93b"></a><a href="#citation93b"
+class="footnote">[93b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Pilot</i>, Aug. 30, 1902,
+p. 220.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote96a"></a><a href="#citation96a"
+class="footnote">[96a]</a>&nbsp; The oldest mention of a
+<i>circulating</i> library known to me is in Hull, in 1650, when
+Sir James Turner found it excellent.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote97a"></a><a href="#citation97a"
+class="footnote">[97a]</a>&nbsp; In his <i>Shakespeare</i>
+(<i>English Men of Letters</i>), pp. 66, 67.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote97b"></a><a href="#citation97b"
+class="footnote">[97b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 77, 78.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote97c"></a><a href="#citation97c"
+class="footnote">[97c]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespearean Myth</i>,
+p. 162.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote100a"></a><a href="#citation100a"
+class="footnote">[100a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 76.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote101a"></a><a href="#citation101a"
+class="footnote">[101a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 81, note I.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote103a"></a><a href="#citation103a"
+class="footnote">[103a]</a>&nbsp; Penzance, <i>The
+Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy</i>, pp. 150, 151.&nbsp; Citing
+Appleton Morgan&rsquo;s <i>Shakespearean Myth</i>, pp. 248,
+298.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote106a"></a><a href="#citation106a"
+class="footnote">[106a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 175.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote107a"></a><a href="#citation107a"
+class="footnote">[107a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 457.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote109a"></a><a href="#citation109a"
+class="footnote">[109a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 58.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote109b"></a><a href="#citation109b"
+class="footnote">[109b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Apology the Actors</i>,
+1612.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote110a"></a><a href="#citation110a"
+class="footnote">[110a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 267.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote111a"></a><a href="#citation111a"
+class="footnote">[111a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 267, 268.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote112a"></a><a href="#citation112a"
+class="footnote">[112a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 50&ndash;52.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote113a"></a><a href="#citation113a"
+class="footnote">[113a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 51.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote113b"></a><a href="#citation113b"
+class="footnote">[113b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 51.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote113c"></a><a href="#citation113c"
+class="footnote">[113c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 500, citing
+Mr. Reed&rsquo;s <i>Francis Bacon our Shake-speare</i>, chap. ii.
+pp. 62, 63.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote113d"></a><a href="#citation113d"
+class="footnote">[113d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+500&ndash;520, chap xvi.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote114a"></a><a href="#citation114a"
+class="footnote">[114a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 512.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote114b"></a><a href="#citation114b"
+class="footnote">[114b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 514.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote114c"></a><a href="#citation114c"
+class="footnote">[114c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 386, note
+I.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote114d"></a><a href="#citation114d"
+class="footnote">[114d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 93.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote120a"></a><a href="#citation120a"
+class="footnote">[120a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Cambridge History of English
+Literature</i>, vol. v. p. 126.&nbsp; Prof. G. P. Baker.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote121a"></a><a href="#citation121a"
+class="footnote">[121a]</a>&nbsp; Furness, <i>Love&rsquo;s
+Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, pp. xiii., 348&ndash;350: <i>cf.</i> pp.
+348, 349, for the four distinct styles of linguistic affectation
+of the period, at least as they are represented in
+literature.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote121b"></a><a href="#citation121b"
+class="footnote">[121b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare Studies in
+Baconian Light</i>, Appendix on Marlowe.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote124a"></a><a href="#citation124a"
+class="footnote">[124a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 516.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote126a"></a><a href="#citation126a"
+class="footnote">[126a]</a>&nbsp; Act i.&nbsp; Scene 2.&nbsp;
+Furness, <i>Love&rsquo;s Labour&rsquo;s Lost</i>, p. 45,
+note.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote127a"></a><a href="#citation127a"
+class="footnote">[127a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 67, 68.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote129a"></a><a href="#citation129a"
+class="footnote">[129a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 66.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote129b"></a><a href="#citation129b"
+class="footnote">[129b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 67.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote136a"></a><a href="#citation136a"
+class="footnote">[136a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 307.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote138a"></a><a href="#citation138a"
+class="footnote">[138a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 308.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote140a"></a><a href="#citation140a"
+class="footnote">[140a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 309.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote141a"></a><a href="#citation141a"
+class="footnote">[141a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 310.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote141b"></a><a href="#citation141b"
+class="footnote">[141b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 310, 311.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote141c"></a><a href="#citation141c"
+class="footnote">[141c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 311.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote142a"></a><a href="#citation142a"
+class="footnote">[142a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 309.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote142b"></a><a href="#citation142b"
+class="footnote">[142b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 311, 312.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote143a"></a><a href="#citation143a"
+class="footnote">[143a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 312, 313.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote145a"></a><a href="#citation145a"
+class="footnote">[145a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 313.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote146a"></a><a href="#citation146a"
+class="footnote">[146a]</a>&nbsp; See Appendix II,
+&ldquo;<i>Chettle&rsquo;s supposed allusion to Will
+Shakspere</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p><a name="footnote147a"></a><a href="#citation147a"
+class="footnote">[147a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 330.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote149a"></a><a href="#citation149a"
+class="footnote">[149a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, pp. 115, 116, 211.&nbsp; <i>See</i> my
+Introduction, p. xxii.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote150a"></a><a href="#citation150a"
+class="footnote">[150a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 210.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote150b"></a><a href="#citation150b"
+class="footnote">[150b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 136.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote151a"></a><a href="#citation151a"
+class="footnote">[151a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 338.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote155a"></a><a href="#citation155a"
+class="footnote">[155a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 346.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote157a"></a><a href="#citation157a"
+class="footnote">[157a]</a>&nbsp; Cited in <i>The Shakespeare
+Problem Restated</i>, p. 353.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote159a"></a><a href="#citation159a"
+class="footnote">[159a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 353.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote159b"></a><a href="#citation159b"
+class="footnote">[159b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Diary</i>, pp. xxvii,
+xxviii.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote160a"></a><a href="#citation160a"
+class="footnote">[160a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 367.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote160b"></a><a href="#citation160b"
+class="footnote">[160b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 368, 369.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote161a"></a><a href="#citation161a"
+class="footnote">[161a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 354.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote163a"></a><a href="#citation163a"
+class="footnote">[163a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 366.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote164a"></a><a href="#citation164a"
+class="footnote">[164a]</a>&nbsp; Some Baconians say so!</p>
+<p><a name="footnote171a"></a><a href="#citation171a"
+class="footnote">[171a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 181, 397.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote171b"></a><a href="#citation171b"
+class="footnote">[171b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 186.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote174a"></a><a href="#citation174a"
+class="footnote">[174a]</a>&nbsp; Some verses of Fletcher&rsquo;s
+may, perhaps, refer to Beaumont&rsquo;s death.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote175a"></a><a href="#citation175a"
+class="footnote">[175a]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton,
+<i>Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp. 246,
+247.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote175b"></a><a href="#citation175b"
+class="footnote">[175b]</a>&nbsp; As to the Aldine Ovid in the
+Bodleian, see Mr. Greenwood in <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, pp. 191, 192.&nbsp; Of course he raises every
+objection, but I do not feel sure that either an affirmative or
+negative result can be attained by <i>expertise</i>.&nbsp; We are
+not told when or where the Bodleian obtained the book; nor what
+is the date of the handwriting of the inscription about W. Hall,
+a personage whom we are to meet later.&nbsp; A good deal of
+business is done in forging names in books.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote176a"></a><a href="#citation176a"
+class="footnote">[176a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 196.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote176b"></a><a href="#citation176b"
+class="footnote">[176b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 197.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote177a"></a><a href="#citation177a"
+class="footnote">[177a]</a>&nbsp; See <i>Frontispiece</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote179a"></a><a href="#citation179a"
+class="footnote">[179a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 247, 248, note I.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote180a"></a><a href="#citation180a"
+class="footnote">[180a]</a>&nbsp; <i>National Review</i>, June
+1912, p. 903.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote180b"></a><a href="#citation180b"
+class="footnote">[180b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>,
+November 1910.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote181a"></a><a href="#citation181a"
+class="footnote">[181a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Outlines</i>, vol. i. p.
+283.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote182a"></a><a href="#citation182a"
+class="footnote">[182a]</a>&nbsp; P. 73, 1806.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote183a"></a><a href="#citation183a"
+class="footnote">[183a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Outlines</i>, vol. i. p.
+283.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote183b"></a><a href="#citation183b"
+class="footnote">[183b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 247.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote186a"></a><a href="#citation186a"
+class="footnote">[186a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 248&ndash;249.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote186b"></a><a href="#citation186b"
+class="footnote">[186b]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp.
+236&ndash;237.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote187a"></a><a href="#citation187a"
+class="footnote">[187a]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, p. 228.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote187b"></a><a href="#citation187b"
+class="footnote">[187b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 199.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote187c"></a><a href="#citation187c"
+class="footnote">[187c]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp.
+332&ndash;333.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote187d"></a><a href="#citation187d"
+class="footnote">[187d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 250.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote188a"></a><a href="#citation188a"
+class="footnote">[188a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 199, note 1.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote189a"></a><a href="#citation189a"
+class="footnote">[189a]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, pp. 339, 342.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote190a"></a><a href="#citation190a"
+class="footnote">[190a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 238.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote198a"></a><a href="#citation198a"
+class="footnote">[198a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 214.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote200a"></a><a href="#citation200a"
+class="footnote">[200a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 214, note 2.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote201a"></a><a href="#citation201a"
+class="footnote">[201a]</a>&nbsp; C. I. Elton, <i>William
+Shakespeare</i>, <i>His Family and Friends</i>, p. 56.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote201b"></a><a href="#citation201b"
+class="footnote">[201b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 28, 29.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote207a"></a><a href="#citation207a"
+class="footnote">[207a]</a>&nbsp; Like Mr. Greenwood, I think
+that Ben was the penman.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote208a"></a><a href="#citation208a"
+class="footnote">[208a]</a>&nbsp; Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>, p.
+10.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote210a"></a><a href="#citation210a"
+class="footnote">[210a]</a>&nbsp; Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>, pp.
+64&ndash;80.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote215a"></a><a href="#citation215a"
+class="footnote">[215a]</a>&nbsp; Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>, pp.
+121&ndash;124.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote216a"></a><a href="#citation216a"
+class="footnote">[216a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 287&ndash;288.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote217a"></a><a href="#citation217a"
+class="footnote">[217a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 290&ndash;291.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote217b"></a><a href="#citation217b"
+class="footnote">[217b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 292, 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote218a"></a><a href="#citation218a"
+class="footnote">[218a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote219a"></a><a href="#citation219a"
+class="footnote">[219a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 489, 490.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote219b"></a><a href="#citation219b"
+class="footnote">[219b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 491.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote219c"></a><a href="#citation219c"
+class="footnote">[219c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,
+p. 352.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote220a"></a><a href="#citation220a"
+class="footnote">[220a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote220b"></a><a href="#citation220b"
+class="footnote">[220b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 491.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote220c"></a><a href="#citation220c"
+class="footnote">[220c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote220d"></a><a href="#citation220d"
+class="footnote">[220d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote221a"></a><a href="#citation221a"
+class="footnote">[221a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 297.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote221b"></a><a href="#citation221b"
+class="footnote">[221b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 297.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote222a"></a><a href="#citation222a"
+class="footnote">[222a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote222b"></a><a href="#citation222b"
+class="footnote">[222b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote222c"></a><a href="#citation222c"
+class="footnote">[222c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote222d"></a><a href="#citation222d"
+class="footnote">[222d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 290, 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote222e"></a><a href="#citation222e"
+class="footnote">[222e]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 351, 358.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223a"></a><a href="#citation223a"
+class="footnote">[223a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223b"></a><a href="#citation223b"
+class="footnote">[223b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 290, 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223c"></a><a href="#citation223c"
+class="footnote">[223c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223d"></a><a href="#citation223d"
+class="footnote">[223d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223e"></a><a href="#citation223e"
+class="footnote">[223e]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 290, 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223f"></a><a href="#citation223f"
+class="footnote">[223f]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 290.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223g"></a><a href="#citation223g"
+class="footnote">[223g]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 290, 291.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote223h"></a><a href="#citation223h"
+class="footnote">[223h]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote224a"></a><a href="#citation224a"
+class="footnote">[224a]</a> <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 351.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote224b"></a><a href="#citation224b"
+class="footnote">[224b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 358.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote224c"></a><a href="#citation224c"
+class="footnote">[224c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 351, 358.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote224d"></a><a href="#citation224d"
+class="footnote">[224d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 290.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote224e"></a><a href="#citation224e"
+class="footnote">[224e]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote225a"></a><a href="#citation225a"
+class="footnote">[225a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 355, 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote226a"></a><a href="#citation226a"
+class="footnote">[226a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 355, 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote226b"></a><a href="#citation226b"
+class="footnote">[226b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 158, 160, 162
+(&ldquo;not the original author&rdquo;), 170.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote226c"></a><a href="#citation226c"
+class="footnote">[226c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+130&ndash;151, 160, 168.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote226d"></a><a href="#citation226d"
+class="footnote">[226d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p., 123, note
+2.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote227a"></a><a href="#citation227a"
+class="footnote">[227a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228a"></a><a href="#citation228a"
+class="footnote">[228a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 160.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228b"></a><a href="#citation228b"
+class="footnote">[228b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228c"></a><a href="#citation228c"
+class="footnote">[228c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 160.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228d"></a><a href="#citation228d"
+class="footnote">[228d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 356.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228e"></a><a href="#citation228e"
+class="footnote">[228e]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 290, 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote228f"></a><a href="#citation228f"
+class="footnote">[228f]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 358.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote229a"></a><a href="#citation229a"
+class="footnote">[229a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 365.&nbsp; I will bet Mr. Greenwood any sum not
+exceeding half a crown that he cannot find any &ldquo;records of
+the writing of&rdquo; either of these plays in Henslowe&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Diary,&rdquo;&mdash;his account book of expenses and
+receipts.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote229b"></a><a href="#citation229b"
+class="footnote">[229b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 365.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote229c"></a><a href="#citation229c"
+class="footnote">[229c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 365.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote229d"></a><a href="#citation229d"
+class="footnote">[229d]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 160.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote231a"></a><a href="#citation231a"
+class="footnote">[231a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 276.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote231b"></a><a href="#citation231b"
+class="footnote">[231b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 290.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote232a"></a><a href="#citation232a"
+class="footnote">[232a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 293.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote232b"></a><a href="#citation232b"
+class="footnote">[232b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 294.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote233a"></a><a href="#citation233a"
+class="footnote">[233a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 57 (1911).</p>
+<p><a name="footnote237a"></a><a href="#citation237a"
+class="footnote">[237a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 453.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote244a"></a><a href="#citation244a"
+class="footnote">[244a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 466.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote245a"></a><a href="#citation245a"
+class="footnote">[245a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 313.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote245b"></a><a href="#citation245b"
+class="footnote">[245b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Supra</i>, p. 143.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote245c"></a><a href="#citation245c"
+class="footnote">[245c]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 466.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote249a"></a><a href="#citation249a"
+class="footnote">[249a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 482.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote250a"></a><a href="#citation250a"
+class="footnote">[250a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 467, 471.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote250b"></a><a href="#citation250b"
+class="footnote">[250b]</a>&nbsp; See chapter IX on <i>The Later
+Life of Shakespeare</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote250c"></a><a href="#citation250c"
+class="footnote">[250c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp. 472, 474.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote251a"></a><a href="#citation251a"
+class="footnote">[251a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 473.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote251b"></a><a href="#citation251b"
+class="footnote">[251b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 474.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote253a"></a><a href="#citation253a"
+class="footnote">[253a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 475.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote254a"></a><a href="#citation254a"
+class="footnote">[254a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 106.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote255a"></a><a href="#citation255a"
+class="footnote">[255a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 478.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote258a"></a><a href="#citation258a"
+class="footnote">[258a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 480.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote259a"></a><a href="#citation259a"
+class="footnote">[259a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 483.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote260a"></a><a href="#citation260a"
+class="footnote">[260a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 483.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote260b"></a><a href="#citation260b"
+class="footnote">[260b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+489&ndash;490.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote260c"></a><a href="#citation260c"
+class="footnote">[260c]</a>&nbsp; See chapter XI, <i>The First
+Folio</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote261a"></a><a href="#citation261a"
+class="footnote">[261a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 483.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote261b"></a><a href="#citation261b"
+class="footnote">[261b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+489&ndash;491.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote262a"></a><a href="#citation262a"
+class="footnote">[262a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 486.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote264a"></a><a href="#citation264a"
+class="footnote">[264a]</a> <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 488.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote266a"></a><a href="#citation266a"
+class="footnote">[266a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 491.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote267a"></a><a href="#citation267a"
+class="footnote">[267a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 295, <i>cf.</i> p. 499.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote268a"></a><a href="#citation268a"
+class="footnote">[268a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 295, 499.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote270a"></a><a href="#citation270a"
+class="footnote">[270a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 499.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote274a"></a><a href="#citation274a"
+class="footnote">[274a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Letters and Life of Francis
+Bacon</i>, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 4 (1861).</p>
+<p><a name="footnote275a"></a><a href="#citation275a"
+class="footnote">[275a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Letters and Life of Francis
+Bacon</i>, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 31.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote275b"></a><a href="#citation275b"
+class="footnote">[275b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. i. pp.
+74&ndash;95.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote276a"></a><a href="#citation276a"
+class="footnote">[276a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Letters and Life of Francis
+Bacon</i>, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. pp.
+108&ndash;109.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote279a"></a><a href="#citation279a"
+class="footnote">[279a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Letters and Life of Francis
+Bacon</i>, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 106.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote279b"></a><a href="#citation279b"
+class="footnote">[279b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, vol. i. pp.
+121&ndash;143.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote280a"></a><a href="#citation280a"
+class="footnote">[280a]</a>&nbsp; Sixty pages in Spedding&rsquo;s
+<i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>, vol. i. pp.
+146&ndash;208.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote281a"></a><a href="#citation281a"
+class="footnote">[281a]</a>&nbsp; See his statement (1603),
+Spedding, iii. pp. 84&ndash;87.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote281b"></a><a href="#citation281b"
+class="footnote">[281b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, iii. p. 253.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote282a"></a><a href="#citation282a"
+class="footnote">[282a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 371&ndash;406.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote282b"></a><a href="#citation282b"
+class="footnote">[282b]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Bacon-Shakespeare
+Controversy</i>, p. 198.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote283a"></a><a href="#citation283a"
+class="footnote">[283a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 391.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote283b"></a><a href="#citation283b"
+class="footnote">[283b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+408&ndash;410.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote284a"></a><a href="#citation284a"
+class="footnote">[284a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 425.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote284b"></a><a href="#citation284b"
+class="footnote">[284b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 431.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote287a"></a><a href="#citation287a"
+class="footnote">[287a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Sufflamen</i> is the
+&ldquo;drag&rdquo; or &ldquo;brake.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben&rsquo;s,
+&ldquo;it was necessary he should be <i>stopped</i>,&rdquo; is an
+incorrect translation.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote288a"></a><a href="#citation288a"
+class="footnote">[288a]</a>&nbsp; Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh,
+<i>Shakespeare</i>, p. 65.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote288b"></a><a href="#citation288b"
+class="footnote">[288b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 65.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote297a"></a><a href="#citation297a"
+class="footnote">[297a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 358&ndash;362.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote298a"></a><a href="#citation298a"
+class="footnote">[298a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 491&ndash;494.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote298b"></a><a href="#citation298b"
+class="footnote">[298b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 495.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote298c"></a><a href="#citation298c"
+class="footnote">[298c]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, pp.
+358&ndash;360.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote299a"></a><a href="#citation299a"
+class="footnote">[299a]</a> <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 361.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote300a"></a><a href="#citation300a"
+class="footnote">[300a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 360.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote300b"></a><a href="#citation300b"
+class="footnote">[300b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 358.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote301a"></a><a href="#citation301a"
+class="footnote">[301a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, p. 495, note I.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote301b"></a><a href="#citation301b"
+class="footnote">[301b]</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>, p. 494.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote304a"></a><a href="#citation304a"
+class="footnote">[304a]</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators of
+Shakespeare</i>, p. 69.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote305a"></a><a href="#citation305a"
+class="footnote">[305a]</a>&nbsp; <i>The Shakespeare Problem
+Restated</i>, pp. 317&ndash;319.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT
+UNKNOWN***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
+***** This file should be named 5127-h.htm or 5127-h.zip******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/5/1/2/5127
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org 
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary 
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+</pre></body>
+</html>
diff --git a/5127-h/images/fpb.jpg b/5127-h/images/fpb.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d9118be
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/fpb.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/fps.jpg b/5127-h/images/fps.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aaa327d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/fps.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p12b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p12b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22614a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p12b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p12s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p12s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b459112
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p12s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p178b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p178b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6b4e547
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p178b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p178s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p178s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1b7b5e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p178s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p180b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p180b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4204b38
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p180b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p180s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p180s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c025836
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p180s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p181b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p181b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3d5481
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p181b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p181s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p181s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..25952d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p181s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p185b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p185b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..aed8dbe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p185b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p185s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p185s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dfe1630
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p185s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p298b.jpg b/5127-h/images/p298b.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9700cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p298b.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p298s.jpg b/5127-h/images/p298s.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..199e48d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p298s.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47ab.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47ab.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8a909a5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47ab.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47as.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47as.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbef234
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47as.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47bb.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47bb.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5dc25f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47bb.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47bs.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47bs.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2976c8e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47bs.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47cb.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47cb.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5050df5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47cb.jpg
diff --git a/5127-h/images/p47cs.jpg b/5127-h/images/p47cs.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a251306
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5127-h/images/p47cs.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c06f2ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #5127 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5127)
diff --git a/old/sbun10.txt b/old/sbun10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..363f906
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sbun10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7741 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+by Andrew Lang
+(#36 in our series by Andrew Lang)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5127]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 5, 2002]
+[Most recently updated: May 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SHAKESPEARE, BACON ETC. ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+The theory that Francis Bacon was, in the main, the author of
+"Shakespeare's plays," has now been for fifty years before the
+learned world.  Its advocates have met with less support than they
+had reason to expect.  Their methods, their logic, and their
+hypotheses closely resemble those applied by many British and foreign
+scholars to Homer; and by critics of the very Highest School to Holy
+Writ.  Yet the Baconian theory is universally rejected in England by
+the professors and historians of English literature; and generally by
+students who have no profession save that of Letters.  The Baconians,
+however, do not lack the countenance and assistance of highly
+distinguished persons, whose names are famous where those of mere men
+of letters are unknown; and in circles where the title of "Professor"
+is not duly respected.
+
+The partisans of Bacon aver (or one of them avers) that "Lord
+Penzance, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Palmerston, Judge Webb, Judge
+Holmes (of Kentucky, U.S.), Prince Bismarck, John Bright, and
+innumerable most THOUGHTFUL SCHOLARS EMINENT IN MANY WALKS OF LIFE,
+AND ESPECIALLY IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION . . . " have been Baconians,
+or, at least, opposed to Will Shakspere's authorship.  To these names
+of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens,
+D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark Twain.  Dr. Clemens
+was, indeed, no mean literary critic; witness his epoch-making study
+of Prof. Dowden's Life of Shelley, while his researches into the
+biography of Jeanne d'Arc were most conscientious.
+
+With the deepest respect for the political wisdom and literary taste
+of Lord Palmerston, Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and the late
+Mr. John Bright; and with every desire to humble myself before the
+judicial verdicts of Judges Holmes, Webb, and Lord Penzance; with
+sincere admiration of my late friend, Dr. Clemens, I cannot regard
+them as, in the first place and professionally, trained students of
+literary history.
+
+They were no more specially trained students of Elizabethan
+literature than myself; they were amateurs in this province, as I am
+an amateur, who differ from all of them in opinion.  Difference of
+opinion concerning points of literary history ought not to make "our
+angry passions rise."  Yet this controversy has been extremely
+bitter.
+
+I abstain from quoting the "sweetmeats," in Captain MacTurk's phrase,
+which have been exchanged by the combatants.  Charges of ignorance
+and monomania have been answered by charges of forgery, lying,
+"scandalous literary dishonesty," and even inaccuracy.  Now no mortal
+is infallibly accurate, but we are all sane and "indifferent honest."
+There have been forgeries in matters Shakespearean, alas, but not in
+connection with the Baconian controversy.
+
+It is an argument of the Baconians, and generally of the impugners of
+good Will's authorship of the plays vulgarly attributed to him, that
+the advocates of William Shakspere, Gent, as author of the plays,
+differ like the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points.  All
+do not believe, with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles,
+Euripides, and AEschylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr.
+Swinburne did, or knew them at all--for that matter.  Mr. Pollard
+differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the
+First Folio and the Quartos:  my sympathies are with Mr. Pollard.
+Few, if any, partisans of Will agree with Mrs. Stopes (herself no
+Baconian) about the history of the Stratford monument of the poet.
+About Will's authorship of Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI, Part I,
+the friends of Will, like the friends of Bacon, are at odds among
+themselves.  These and other divergencies of opinion cause the
+Baconians to laugh, as if THEY were a harmonious circle . . . !  For
+the Baconian camp is not less divided against itself than the camp of
+the "Stratfordians."  Not all Baconians hold that Bacon was the
+legitimate son of "that Imperial votaress" Queen Elizabeth.  Not all
+believe in the Cryptogram of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, or in any other
+cryptograms.  Not all maintain that Bacon, in the Sonnets, was
+inspired by a passion for the Earl of Essex, for Queen Elizabeth, or
+for an early miniature of himself.  Not all regard him as the author
+of the plays of Kit Marlowe.  Not all suppose him to be a
+Rosicrucian, who possibly died at the age of a hundred and six, or,
+perhaps, may be "still running."  Not all aver that he wrote thirteen
+plays before 1593.  But one party holds that, in the main, Will was
+the author of the plays, while the other party votes for Bacon--or
+for Bungay, a Great Unknown.  I use Bungay as an endearing term for
+the mysterious being who was the Author if Francis Bacon was not.
+Friar Bungay was the rival of Friar Bacon, as the Unknown (if he was
+not Francis Bacon) is the rival of "the inventor of Inductive
+reasoning."
+
+I could never have expected that I should take a part in this
+controversy; but acquaintance with The Shakespeare Problem Restated
+(503 pp.), (1908), and later works of Mr. G. G. Greenwood, M.P., has
+tempted me to enter the lists.
+
+Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is learned
+(and I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and Judge Holmes
+were rather ignorant).  He is not over "the threshold of Eld" (as
+were Judge Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean
+criticism).  His knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly
+superior to mine, for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold's words, as
+"a belletristic trifler."
+
+Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge of
+legal evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not "hold a brief for
+Bacon" as the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems, and does
+not value Baconian cryptograms.  In the following chapters I make
+endeavours, conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of Mr.
+Greenwood.  It is a negative theory.  He denies that Will Shakspere
+(or Shaxbere, or Shagspur, and so on) was the author of the plays and
+poems.  Some other party was, IN THE MAIN, with other hands, the
+author.  Mr. Greenwood cannot, or does not, offer a guess as to who
+this ingenious Somebody was.  He does not affirm, and he does not
+deny, that Bacon had a share, greater or less, in the undertaking.
+
+In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every argument; to
+traverse every field.  In philology I am all unlearned, and cannot
+pretend to discuss the language of Shakespeare, any more than I can
+analyse the language of Homer into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so
+on.  Again, I cannot pretend to have an opinion, based on internal
+evidence, about the genuine Shakespearean character of such plays as
+Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Part I, and Troilus and Cressida.  About
+them different views are held WITHIN both camps.
+
+I am no lawyer or naturalist (as Partridge said, Non omnia possumus
+omnes), and cannot imagine why our Author is so accurate in his
+frequent use of terms of law--if he be Will; and so totally at sea in
+natural history--if he be Francis, who "took all knowledge for his
+province."
+
+How can a layman pretend to deal with Shakespeare's legal
+attainments, after he has read the work of the learned Recorder of
+Bristol, Mr. Castle, K.C.?  To his legal mind it seems that in some
+of Will's plays he had the aid of an expert in law, and then his
+technicalities were correct.  In other plays he had no such tutor,
+and then he was sadly to seek in his legal jargon.  I understand Mr.
+Greenwood to disagree on this point.  Mr. Castle says, "I think
+Shakespeare would have had no difficulty in getting aid from several
+sources.  There is therefore no prima facie reason why we should
+suppose the information was supplied by Bacon."
+
+Of course there is not!
+
+"In fact, there are some reasons why one should attribute the legal
+assistance, say, to Coke, rather than to Bacon."
+
+The truth is, that Bacon seems not to have been lawyer enough for
+Will's purposes.  "We have no reason to believe that Bacon was
+particularly well read in the technicalities of our law; he never
+seems to have seriously followed his profession." {0a}
+
+Now we have Mr. Greenwood's testimonial in favour of Mr. Castle, "Who
+really does know something about law." {0b}  Mr. Castle thinks that
+Bacon really did not know enough about law, and suggests Sir Edward
+Coke, of all human beings, as conceivably Will's "coach" on legal
+technicalities.  Perhaps Will consulted the Archbishop of Canterbury
+on theological niceties?
+
+Que scais je?  In some plays, says Mr. Castle, Will's law is all
+right, in other plays it is all wrong.  As to Will's law, when Mr.
+Greenwood and Mr. Castle differ, a layman dare not intervene.
+
+Concerning legend and tradition about our Will, it seems that, in
+each case, we should do our best to trace the Quellen, to discover
+the original sources, and the steps by which the tale arrived at its
+late recorders in print; and then each man's view as to the veracity
+of the story will rest on his sense of probability; and on his bias,
+his wish to believe or to disbelieve.
+
+There exists, I believe, only one personal anecdote of Will, the
+actor, and on it the Baconians base an argument against the
+contemporary recognition of him as a dramatic author.  I take the
+criticism of Mr. Greenwood (who is not a Baconian).  One John
+Manningham, Barrister-at-Law, "a well-educated and cultured man,"
+notes in his Diary (February 2, 1601) that "at our feast we had a
+play called Twelve Night or What you Will, much like the Comedy of
+Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in
+Italian called Inganni."  He confides to his Diary the tricks played
+on Malvolio as "a good practice." {0c}  That is all.
+
+About the authorship he says nothing:  perhaps he neither knew nor
+cared who the author was.  In our day the majority of people who tell
+me about a play which they have seen, cannot tell me the name of the
+author.  Yet it is usually printed on the playbill, though in modest
+type.  The public does not care a straw about the author's name,
+unless he be deservedly famous for writing letters to the newspapers
+on things in general; for his genius as an orator; his enthusiasm as
+a moralist, or in any other extraneous way.  Dr. Forman in his queer
+account of the plot of "Mack Beth" does not allude to the name of the
+author (April 20, 1610).  Twelfth Night was not published till 1623,
+in the Folio:  there was no quarto to enlighten Manningham about the
+author's name.  We do not hear of printed playbills, with author's
+names inserted, at that period.  It seems probable that occasional
+playgoers knew and cared no more about authors than they do at
+present.  The world of the wits, the critics (such as Francis Meres),
+poets, playwrights, and players, did know and care about the authors;
+apparently Manningham did not.  But he heard a piquant anecdote of
+two players and (March 13, 1601) inserted it in his Diary.
+
+Shakespeare once anticipated Richard Burbage at an amorous tryst with
+a citizen's wife.  Burbage had, by the way, been playing the part of
+Richard III.  While Will was engaged in illicit dalliance, the
+message was brought (what a moment for bringing messages!) that
+Richard III was at the door, and Will "caused return to be made that
+William the Conqueror was before Richard III.  Shakespeare's name
+William."  (My italics.)  Mr. Greenwood argues that if "Shakspere the
+player was known to the world as the author of the plays of
+Shakespeare, it does seem extremely remarkable" that Manningham
+should have thought it needful to add "Shakespeare's name William."
+{0d}
+
+But WAS "Shakspere," or any man, "known to the world as the author of
+the plays of Shakespeare"?  No! for Mr. Greenwood writes, "nobody,
+outside a very small circle, troubled his head as to who the
+dramatist or dramatists might be." {0e}  To that "very small circle"
+we have no reason to suppose that Manningham belonged, despite his
+remarkable opinion that Twelfth Night resembles the Menaechmi.
+Consequently, it is NOT "extremely remarkable" that Manningham wrote
+"Shakespeare's name William," to explain to posterity the joke about
+"William the Conqueror," instead of saying, "the brilliant author of
+the Twelfth Night play which so much amused me at our feast a few
+weeks ago." {0f}  "Remarkable" out of all hooping it would have been
+had Manningham written in the style of Mr. Greenwood.  But Manningham
+apparently did not "trouble his head as to who the dramatist or
+dramatists might be."  "Nobody, outside a very small circle," DID
+trouble his poor head about that point.  Yet Mr. Greenwood thinks "it
+does seem extremely remarkable" that Manningham did not mention the
+author.
+
+Later, on the publication of the Folio (1623), the world seems to
+have taken more interest in literary matters.  Mr. Greenwood says
+that then while "the multitude" would take Ben Jonson's noble
+panegyric on Shakespeare as a poet "au pied de la lettre," "the
+enlightened few would recognise that it had an esoteric meaning."
+{0g}  Then, it seems, "the world"--the "multitude"--regarded the
+actor as the author.  Only "the enlightened few" were aware that when
+Ben SAID "Shakespeare," and "Swan of Avon," he MEANT--somebody else.
+
+Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by persons
+of different mental conditions.  For example, in 1635 or 1636,
+Cuthbert Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous actor, Will's
+comrade, petitioned Lord Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, for
+consideration in a quarrel about certain theatres.  Telling the
+history of the houses, he mentions that the Burbages "to ourselves
+joined those deserving men, Shakspere, Heminge, Condell, Phillips and
+others."  Cuthbert is arguing his case solely from the point of the
+original owners or lease-holders of the houses, and of the well-known
+actors to whom they joined themselves.  Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood
+think that "it does indeed seem strange . . . that the proprietor[s]
+of the playhouses which had been made famous by the production of the
+Shakespearean plays, should, in 1635--twelve years after the
+publication of the great Folio--describe their reputed author to the
+survivor of the Incomparable Pair, as merely a 'man-player' and 'a
+deserving man.'"  Why did he not remind the Lord Chamberlain that
+this "deserving man" was the author of all these famous dramas?  Was
+it because he was aware that the Earl of Pembroke "knew better than
+that"? {0h}
+
+These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof positive of
+their case.
+
+Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of what
+the Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated, in 1623,
+to him and his brother, by Will's friends, Heminge and Condell, as
+they had been patrons of the late William Shakspere and admirers of
+his plays.  The terms of this dedication are to be cited in the text,
+later.  WE all NOW would have reminded the Earl of what he very well
+knew.  Cuthbert did not.
+
+The intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will
+read pp. 481-484 in William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, by
+the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton.  Cuthbert was a
+puzzle-pated old boy.  The silence as to Will's authorship on the
+part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635-36, cannot outweigh
+the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed
+by his friends and fellow-actors in 1623.
+
+Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for the
+affirmative to negative evidence from silence, the silence of
+Cuthbert Burbage.
+
+One may read through Mr. Greenwood's three books and note the
+engaging varieties of his views; they vary as suits his argument; but
+he is unaware of it, or can justify his varyings.  Thus, in 1610, one
+John Davies wrote rhymes in which he speaks of "our English Terence,
+Mr. Will Shakespeare"; "good Will."  In his period patriotic English
+critics called a comic dramatist "the English Terence," or "the
+English Plautus," precisely as American critics used to call Mr.
+Bryant "the American Wordsworth," or Cooper "the American Scott"; and
+as Scots called the Rev. Mr. Thomson "the Scottish Turner."
+Somewhere, I believe, exists "the Belgian Shakespeare."
+
+Following this practice, Davies had to call Will either "our English
+Terence," or "our English Plautus."  Aristophanes would not have been
+generally recognised; and Will was no more like one of these ancient
+authors than another.  Thus Davies was apt to choose either Plautus
+or Terence; it was even betting which he selected.  But he chanced to
+choose Terence; and this is "curious," and suggests suspicions to Mr.
+Greenwood--and the Baconians.  They are so very full of suspicions!
+
+It does not suit the Baconians, or Mr. Greenwood, to find
+contemporary recognition of Will as an author. {0i}  Consequently,
+Mr. Greenwood finds Davies's "curious, and at first sight,
+inappropriate comparison of 'Shake-speare' to Terence worthy of
+remark, for Terence is the very author whose name is alleged to have
+been used as a mask-name, or nom de plume, for the writings of great
+men who wished to keep the fact of their authorship concealed."
+
+Now Davies felt bound to bring in SOME Roman parallel to Shakespeare;
+and had only the choice of Terence or Plautus.  Meres (1598) used
+Plautus; Davies used Terence.  Mr. Greenwood {0j} shows us that
+Plautus would not do.  "Could HE" (Shakespeare) "write only of
+courtesans and cocottes, and not of ladies highly born, cultured, and
+refined? . . . "
+
+"The supposed parallel" (Plautus and Shakespeare) "breaks down at
+every point."  Thus, on Mr. Greenwood's showing, Plautus could not
+serve Davies, or should not serve him, in his search for a Roman
+parallel to "good Will."  But Mr. Greenwood also writes, "if he"
+(Shakespeare) "was to be likened to a Latin comedian, surely Plautus
+is the writer with whom he should have been compared." {0k}  Yet
+Plautus was the very man who cannot be used as a parallel to
+Shakespeare.  Of course no Roman nor any other comic dramatist
+closely resembles the AUTHOR of As You Like It.  They who selected
+either Plautus or Terence meant no more than that both were
+celebrated comic dramatists.  Plautus was no parallel to Will.  Yet
+"surely Plautus is the author to whom he should have been compared"
+by Davies, says Mr. Greenwood.  If Davies tried Plautus, the
+comparison was bad; if Terence, it was "curious," as Terence was
+absurdly accused of being the "nom de plume" of some great "concealed
+poets" of Rome.  "From all the known facts about Terence," says a
+Baconian critic (who has consulted Smith's Biographical Dictionary),
+"it is an almost unavoidable inference that John Davies made the
+comparison to Shakspere because he knew of the point common to both
+cases."  The common point is taken to be, not that both men were
+famous comic dramatists, but that Roman literary gossips said, and
+that Baconians and Mr. Greenwood say, that "Terence" was said to be a
+"mask-name," and that "Shakespeare" is a mask-name.  Of the second
+opinion there is not a hint in literature of the time of good Will.
+
+What surprises one most in this controversy is that men eminent in
+the legal profession should be "anti-Shakesperean," if not overtly
+Baconian.  For the evidence for the contemporary faith in Will's
+authorship is all positive; from his own age comes not a whisper of
+doubt, not even a murmur of surprise.  It is incredible to me that
+his fellow-actors and fellow-playwrights should have been deceived,
+especially when they were such men as Ben Jonson and Tom Heywood.
+One would expect lawyers, of all people, to have been most impatient
+of the surprising attempts made to explain away Ben Jonson's
+testimony, by aid, first, of quite a false analogy (Scott's denial of
+his own authorship of his novels), and, secondly, by the suppression
+of such a familiar fact as the constant inconsistency of Ben's
+judgments of his contemporaries in literature.  Mr. Greenwood must
+have forgotten the many examples of this inconsistency; but I have
+met a Baconian author who knew nothing of the fact.  Mr. Greenwood,
+it is proper to say, does not seem to be satisfied that he has solved
+what he calls "the Jonsonian riddle."  Really, there is no riddle.
+About Will, as about other authors, his contemporaries and even his
+friends, on occasion, Ben "spoke with two voices," now in terms of
+hyperbolical praise, now in carping tones of censure.  That is the
+obvious solution of "the Jonsonian riddle."
+
+I must apologise if I have in places spelled the name of the Swan of
+Avon "Shakespeare" where Mr. Greenwood would write "Shakspere," and
+vice versa.  He uses "Shakespeare" where he means the Author;
+"Shakspere" where he means Will; and is vexed with some people who
+write the name of Will as "Shakespeare."  As Will, in the opinion of
+a considerable portion of the human race, and of myself, WAS the
+Author, one is apt to write his name as "Shakespeare" in the usual
+way.  But difficult cases occur, as in quotations, and in conditional
+sentences.  By any spelling of the name I always mean the undivided
+personality of "Him who sleeps by Avon."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I:  THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN POSITIONS
+
+
+
+Till the years 1856-7 no voice was raised against the current belief
+about Shakespeare (1564-1616).  He was the author in the main of the
+plays usually printed as his.  In some cases other authors, one or
+more, may have had fingers in his dramas; in other cases, Shakespeare
+may have "written over" and transfigured earlier plays, of himself
+and of others; he may have contributed, more or less, to several
+plays mainly by other men.  Separately printed dramas published
+during his time carry his name on their title-pages, but are not
+included in the first collected edition of his dramas, "The First
+Folio," put forth by two of his friends and fellow-actors, in 1623,
+seven years after his death.
+
+On all these matters did commentators, critics, and antiquarians for
+long dispute; but none denied that the actor, Will Shakspere (spelled
+as heaven pleased), was in the main the author of most of the plays
+of 1623, and the sole author of Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the
+Sonnets.
+
+Even now, in England at least, it would be perhaps impossible to find
+one special and professed student of Elizabethan literature, and of
+the classical and European literatures, who does not hold by the
+ancient belief, the belief of Shakespeare's contemporaries and
+intimates, the belief that he was, in the sense explained above, the
+author of the plays.
+
+But ours is not a generation to be overawed by "Authority" (as it is
+called).  A small but eager company of scholars have convinced
+themselves that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays.  That is
+the point of agreement among these enthusiasts:  points of difference
+are numerous:  some very wild little sects exist.  Meanwhile
+multitudes of earnest and intelligent men and women, having read
+notices in newspapers of the Baconian books, or heard of them at
+lectures and tea-parties, disbelieve in the authorship of "the
+Stratford rustic," and look down on the faithful of Will Shakespere
+with extreme contempt.
+
+From the Baconians we receive a plain straightforward theory, "Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare," as one of their own prophets has said. {4a}
+Since we have plenty of evidence for Bacon's life and occupations
+during the period of Shakespearean poetic activity, we can compare
+what he was doing as a man, a student, a Crown lawyer, a pleader in
+the Courts, a political pamphleteer, essayist, courtier, active
+member of Parliament, and so on, with what he is said to have been
+doing--by the Baconians; namely, writing two dramas yearly.
+
+But there is another "Anti-Willian" theory, which would dethrone Will
+Shakspere, and put but a Shadow in his place.  Conceive a "concealed
+poet," of high social position, contemporary with Bacon and
+Shakespeare.  Let him be so fond of the Law that he cannot keep legal
+"shop" out of his love Sonnets even.  Make him a courtier; a
+statesman; a philosopher; a scholar who does not blench even from the
+difficult Latin of Ovid and Plautus.  Let this almost omniscient
+being possess supreme poetic genius, extensive classical attainments,
+and a tendency to make false quantities.  Then conceive him to live
+through the reigns of "Eliza and our James," without leaving in
+history, in science, in society, in law, in politics or scholarship,
+a single trace of his existence.  He left nothing but the poems and
+plays usually attributed to Will.  As to the date of his decease, we
+only know that it must necessarily have been later than the
+composition of the last genuine Shakespearean play--for this paragon
+wrote it.
+
+Such is the Being who occupies, in the theory of the non-Baconian,
+BUT NOT ANTI-BACONIAN, Anti-Willians, the intellectual throne filled,
+in the Will Shakespeare theory, by Will; and in the Baconian, by
+Bacon--two kings of Brentford on one throne.
+
+We are to be much engaged by the form of this theory which is held by
+Mr. G. G. Greenwood in his The Shakespeare Problem Restated.  In
+attempting to explain what he means I feel that I am skating on very
+thin ice.  Already, in two volumes (In Re Shakespeare, 1909, and The
+Vindicators of Shakespeare), Mr. Greenwood has accused his critics of
+frequently misconceiving and misrepresenting his ideas:  wherefore I
+also tremble.  I am perfectly confident in saying that he "holds no
+brief for the Baconians."  He is NOT a Baconian.  His position is
+negative merely:  Will of Stratford is NOT the author of the
+Shakespearean plays and poems.  Then who is?  Mr. Greenwood believes
+that work by an unknown number of hands exists in the plays first
+published all together in 1623.  Here few will differ from him.  But,
+setting aside this aspect of the case, Mr. Greenwood appears to me to
+believe in an entity named "Shakespeare," or "the Author," who is the
+predominating partner; though Mr. Greenwood does not credit him with
+all the plays in the Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the absolute
+entirety of any given play).  "The Author" or "Shakespeare" is not a
+syndicate (like the Homer of many critics), but an individual human
+being, apparently of the male sex.  As to the name by which he was
+called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is "agnostic."  He himself is not
+Anti-Baconian.  He does not oust Bacon and put the Unknown in his
+place.  He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon may have
+contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work.  To put
+it briefly:  Mr. Greenwood backs the field against the favourite (our
+Will), and Bacon MAY be in the field.  If he has any part in the
+whole I suspect that it is "the lion's part," but Mr. Greenwood does
+not commit himself to anything positive.  We shall find (if I am not
+mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the hypothesis of the Baconians
+as "an extremely reasonable one," {7a} and that for his purposes it
+would be an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential.  For as
+Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit, he
+is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily believe--I cannot
+believe--that the actual "Author," the "Shakespeare" lived and died
+and left no trace of his existence except his share in the works
+called Shakespearean.
+
+However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this
+advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we
+cannot, as in Bacon's case, show how he was occupied while the plays
+were being composed.  He MUST, however, have been much at Court, we
+learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology.  Was he Sir
+Edward Coke?  Was he James VI and I?
+
+It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of
+the "Anti-Willians" in a shape which will satisfy them.  The task,
+especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps
+impossible.  I can only summarise their views in my own words as far
+as I presume to understand them.  I conceive the Baconians to cry
+that "the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature,
+attributed to a man named William SHAKESPEARE."  Of a man named
+William SHAKSPERE (there are many varieties of spelling) we certainly
+know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon, a
+peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town.  There is
+absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing)
+ever went to Stratford school.  His father, his mother, and his
+daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if
+he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.
+As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death
+inform us, he was a butcher's apprentice; and also a schoolmaster
+"who knew Latin pretty well"; and a poacher.  He made, before he was
+nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls "ante-nup."  He
+early had three children, whom he deserted, as he deserted his wife.
+He came to London, we do not know when (about 1582, according to the
+"guess" of an antiquary of 1680); held horses at the door of a
+theatre (so tradition says), was promoted to the rank of "servitor"
+(whatever that may mean), became an actor (a vagabond under the Act),
+and by 1594 played before Queen Elizabeth.  He put money in his
+pocket (heaven knows how), for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best
+house in his native bourgade.  He obtained, by nefarious genealogical
+falsehoods (too common, alas, in heraldry), the right to bear arms;
+and went on acting.  In 1610-11 (?) he retired to his native place.
+He never took any interest in his unprinted manuscript plays; though
+rapacious, he never troubled himself about his valuable copyrights;
+never dreamed of making a collected edition of his works.  He died in
+1616, probably of drink taken.  Legal documents prove him to have
+been a lender of small sums, an avid creditor, a would-be encloser of
+commons.  In his will he does not bequeath or mention any books,
+manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.  It is utterly incredible,
+then, that this man wrote the poems and plays, so rich in poetry,
+thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed to "William
+Shakespeare."  These must be the works of "a concealed poet," a
+philosopher, a courtier moving in the highest circles, a supreme
+legist, and, necessarily, a great poet, and student of the classics.
+
+No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a
+scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other
+qualifications so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon--
+or some person unknown, who was in all respects equally
+distinguished, but kept his light under a bushel.  Consequently the
+name "William Shakespeare" is a pseudonym or "pen-name" wisely
+adopted by Bacon (or the other man) as early as 1593, at a time when
+William Shakspere was notoriously an actor in the company which
+produced the plays of the genius styling himself "William
+Shakespeare."
+
+Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of
+expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now
+summarised the views of the Baconians sans phrase, and of the more
+cautious or more credulous "Anti-Willians," as I may style the party
+who deny to Will the actor any share in the authorship of the plays,
+but do not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.
+
+Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the
+controversy is The Shakespeare Problem Restated, by Mr. G. G.
+Greenwood (see my Introduction).  To this volume I turn for the
+exposition of the theory that "Will Shakspere" (with many other
+spellings) is an actor from the country--a man of very scanty
+education, in all probability, and wholly destitute of books; while
+"William Shakespeare," or with the hyphen, "Shake-speare," is a "nom
+de plume" adopted by the Great Unknown "concealed poet."
+
+When I use the word "author" here, I understand Mr. Greenwood to mean
+that in the plays called "Shakespearean" there exists work from many
+pens:  owing to the curious literary manners, methods, and ethics of
+dramatic writing in, say, 1589-1611.  In my own poor opinion this is
+certainly true of several plays in the first collected edition, "The
+Folio," produced seven years after Will's death, namely in 1623.
+These curious "collective" methods of play-writing are to be
+considered later.
+
+Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that
+"William Shake-speare" (with or without the hyphen), on the title-
+pages of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems, is the
+chosen pen-name, or "nom de plume," of Bacon or of the Unknown.
+
+Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written
+{11a} on the name of the actor, and the "nom de plume" of the unknown
+author who, by the theory, was not the actor.  Let me first confess
+my firm belief that there is no cause for all the copious writing
+about the spellings "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare"--as indicating
+the true but "concealed poet"--and "Shakspere" (&c.), as indicating
+the Warwickshire rustic.  At Stratford and in Warwickshire the clan-
+name was spelled in scores of ways, was spelled in different ways
+within a single document.  If the actor himself uniformly wrote
+"Shakspere" (it seems that we have but five signatures), he was
+accustomed to seeing the name spelled variously in documents
+concerning him and his affairs.  In London the printers aimed at a
+kind of uniformity, "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare":  and even if he
+wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.  Lawyers and
+printers might choose their own mode of spelling--and there is no
+more in the matter.
+
+I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations
+are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood's
+researches.  "The family of William Shakspere of Stratford" (perhaps
+it were safer to say "the members of his name") "wrote their name in
+many different ways--some sixty, I believe, have been noted . . . but
+the form 'Shakespeare' seems never to have been employed by them";
+and, according to Mr. Spedding, "Shakspere of Stratford never so
+wrote his name 'in any known case.'"  (According to many Baconians he
+never wrote his name in his life.)  On the other hand, the
+dedications of Venus and Adonis (1593) and of Lucrece (1594) are
+inscribed "William Shakespeare" (without the hyphen).  In 1598, the
+title-page of Love's Labour's Lost "bore the name W. Shakespere,"
+while in the same year Richard II and Richard III bear "William
+Shake-speare," with the hyphen (not without it, as in the two
+dedications by the Author).  "The name which appears in the body of
+the conveyance and of the mortgage bearing" (the actor's) "signature
+is 'Shakespeare,' while 'Shackspeare' appears in the will, prepared,
+as we must presume, by or under the directions of Francis Collyns,
+the Stratford solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto" (and
+received a legacy of 13 pounds, 6s. 8d.).
+
+Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it
+is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages--
+and also is spelled otherwise, as "Shackspeare."  In March 1594 the
+actor's name is spelled "Shakespeare" in Treasury accounts.  The
+legal and the literary and Treasury spellings (and conveyances and
+mortgages and wills are NOT literature) are Shakespeare, Shackspeare,
+Shake-speare, Shakespere--all four are used, but we must regard the
+actor as never signing "Shakespeare" in any of these varieties of
+spelling--if sign he ever did; at all events he is not known to have
+used the A in the last syllable.
+
+I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood's words {13a} concerning the
+nom de plume of the "concealed poet," whoever he was.
+
+"And now a word upon the name 'Shakespeare.'  That in this form, and
+more especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare, the word makes an
+excellent nom de plume is obvious.  As old Thomas Fuller remarks, the
+name suggests Martial in its warlike sound, 'Hasti-vibrans or Shake-
+speare.'  It is of course further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the
+goddess of Wisdom, for Pallas also was a spear-shaker (Pallas a'p?'
+t?? p???e?? t?' d???); and all will remember Ben Jonson's verses . .
+. " on Shakespeare's "true-filed lines" -
+
+
+"In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
+As brandished at the eyes of ignorance."
+
+
+There is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can
+easily be made), and about "Jonson's Cri-spinus or Cri-spinas," but
+perhaps we have now the gist of Mr. Greenwood's remarks on the
+"excellent nom de plume" (cf. pp. 31-37.  On the whole of this, cf.
+The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 293-295; a nom de plume called
+a "pseudonym," pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare "a mask name," p. 328; a
+"pseudonym," p. 330; "nom de plume," p. 335).
+
+Now why was the "nom de plume" or "pseudonym" "William Shakespeare"
+"an excellent nom de plume" for a concealed author, courtier, lawyer,
+scholar, and so forth?  If "Shakespeare" suggested Pallas Athene,
+goddess of wisdom and of many other things, and so was appropriate,
+why add "William"?
+
+In 1593, when the "pseudonym" first appears in Venus and Adonis, a
+country actor whose name, in legal documents--presumably drawn up by
+or for his friend, Francis Collyns at Stratford--is written "William
+Shakespeare," was before the town as an actor in the leading company,
+that of the Lord Chamberlain.  This company produced the plays some
+of which, by 1598, bear "W. Shakespere," or "William Shakespeare" on
+their title-pages.  Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his
+name "Shakspere," "William Shakespeare" was, practically (on the
+Baconian theory), not only a pseudonym of one man, a poet, but also
+the real name of another man, a well-known actor, who was NOT the
+"concealed poet."
+
+"William Shakespeare" or "Shakespere" was thus, in my view, the
+ideally worst pseudonym which a poet who wished to be "concealed"
+could possibly have had the fatuity to select.  His plays and poems
+would be, as they were, universally attributed to the actor, who is
+represented as a person conspicuously incapable of writing them.
+With Mr. Greenwood's arguments against the certainty of this
+attribution I deal later.
+
+Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide
+reading, the choice of name might have been judicious.  A "concealed
+poet" of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting the
+plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies
+from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain's Company, through that
+knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will
+Shakspere.  He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as
+it was his whim to do.  The actor might make fair copies in his own
+hand, give them to his company, and say that the improved works were
+from his own pen and genius.  The lie might pass, but only if the
+actor, in his life and witty talk, seemed very capable of doing what
+he pretended to have done.  But if the actor, according to some
+Baconians, could not write even his own name, he was impossible as a
+mask for the poet.  He was also impossible, I think, if he were what
+Mr. Greenwood describes him to be.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to
+London, does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name.
+But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is
+no documentary record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps "he was
+removed from school long before the usual age," "in all probability"
+when "he was about thirteen" (an age at which some boys, later well
+known, went up to their universities).  If we send him to school at
+seven or so, "it appears that he could only have enjoyed such
+advantages as it may be supposed to have provided for a period of
+five or six years at the outside.  He was then withdrawn, and, as it
+seems, put to calf-slaughtering." {16a}
+
+What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will "could
+have learned but little there.  No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar
+schools, if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin
+driven into them.  Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was
+taught; and an industrious boy who had gone through the course and
+attained to the higher classes would generally be able to write fair
+Latin prose.  But he would learn very little else" (except to write
+fair Latin prose?).  "What we now call 'culture' certainly did not
+enter into the 'curriculum,' nor 'English,' nor modern languages, nor
+'literature.'" {17a}  Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that "removed
+prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a
+bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse
+to scholastic progress--it is difficult to believe that when he first
+left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished
+accomplishments." {17b}  Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a
+butcher or draper, but doubts the poaching, and the frequent
+whippings and imprisonments, as in the story told by the Rev. R.
+Davies in 1708. {17c}
+
+That this promising young man, "when he came to London, spoke the
+Warwickshire dialect or patois is, then, as certain as anything can
+be that is incapable of mathematical proof." {17d}  "Here is the
+young Warwickshire provincial . . . " {17e} producing, apparently
+five or six years after his arrival in town, Venus and Adonis . . .
+"Is it conceivable that this was the work of the Stratford Player of
+whom we know so little, but of whom we know so much too much?  If so
+we have here a veritable sixteenth-century miracle." {17f}  Moreover,
+"our great supposed poet and dramatist had at his death neither book
+nor manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally
+entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever." {17g}
+
+If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a patois
+could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable in
+1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed "William Shakespeare."  No man
+who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the
+author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that
+the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor's authorship; ignorant as
+he was, bookless, and rude of speech.  For such a Will as Mr.
+Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and dramatic world of
+his age that he DID write the plays, would have been a miracle.
+Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to persuade us that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Will DID persuade, say Ben Jonson, of his
+authorship and we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-
+century miracle of persuasion.
+
+Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an
+enthusiastic Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not
+easily pass for the Author. {18a}  But his own bookless actor with a
+patois seems to him, as author of Venus and Adonis, almost
+inconceivable.  Yet, despite Will's bookless rusticity, this poem
+with Lucrece, which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not
+translated into English by 1593, was regarded as his own.  I must
+suppose, therefore, that Will was NOT manifestly so ignorant of Latin
+as Mr. Greenwood thinks.  "I think it highly probable," says this
+critic, "that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford" (where
+nothing but Latin was taught) "for four or five years, and that,
+later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to
+'bumbast out a line,' and perhaps to pose as 'Poet-Ape that would be
+thought our chief.'  Nay, I am not at all sure that he would not have
+been capable of collaborating with such a man as George Wilkins, and
+perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better.  But it
+does not follow from this that he was the author either of Venus and
+Adonis or of Hamlet." {19a}
+
+Nothing follows from all this:  we merely see that, in Mr.
+Greenwood's private opinion, the actor might write even better than
+George Wilkins, but could not write Venus and Adonis.  Will,
+therefore, though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of
+literature, in partnership with Wilkins.  We have merely the critic's
+opinion that Will could not write Hamlet, even if, like Wordsworth,
+"he had the mind," even if the gods had made him more poetical than
+Wilkins.
+
+Again, "he had had but little schooling; he had 'small Latin and less
+Greek'" (as Ben Jonson truly says), "but he was a good Johannes
+Factotum; he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, 'bumbast out
+a blank verse.'" {19b}
+
+The "Johannes Factotum," who could "bumbast out a blank verse," is
+taken from Robert Greene's hackneyed attack on an actor-poet, "Shake-
+scene," published in 1592.  "Poet-Ape that would be thought our
+chief," is from an epigram on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601-16?).
+If the allusions by Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592,
+had a literary ambition so towering that he thought his own work in
+the new art of dramatic blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not
+to speak of Wilkins), and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to
+three of his playwright friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.
+
+If Jonson's "Poet-Ape" be meant for Will, by 1601 Will would fain "be
+thought the chief" of contemporary dramatists.  His vanity soared far
+above George Wilkins!  Greene's phrases and Jonson's are dictated by
+spite, jealousy, and envy; and from them a true view of the work of
+the man whom they envy, the actor-poet, cannot be obtained.  We might
+as well judge Moliere in the spirit of the author of Elomire
+Hypocondre, and of de Vise!  The Anti-Willian arguments keep on
+appearing, going behind the scenes, and reappearing, like a stage
+army.  To avoid this phenomenon I reserve what is to be said about
+"Shake-scene" and "Poet-Ape" for another place (pp. 138-145 infra).
+But I must give the reader a warning.  Concerning "William
+Shakespeare" as a "nom de plume," or pseudonym, Mr. Greenwood says,
+"Some, indeed, would see through it, and roundly accuse the player of
+putting forth the works of others as his own.  To such he would be a
+'Poet-Ape,' or 'an upstart crow' (Shake-scene) 'beautified with the
+feathers of other writers.'" {21a}
+
+If this be true, if "some would see through" (Mr. Greenwood,
+apparently, means DID "see through") the "nom de plume," the case of
+the Anti-Willians is promising.  But, in this matter, Mr. Greenwood
+se trompe.  Neither Greene nor Jonson accused "Shake-scene" or "Poet-
+Ape" of "putting forth the works of others as his own."  That is
+quite certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene have reached
+us.  (See pp. 141-145 infra.)
+
+If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were credited
+with the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in "the
+profession," and among rival playwrights who envied the wealth and
+"glory" of the actors.  This curiosity, prompting the wits and
+players to watch and "shadow" Will, would, to put it mildly, most
+seriously imperil the secret of the concealed author who had the
+folly to sign himself "William Shakespeare."  Human nature could not
+rest under such a provocation as the "concealed poet" offered.
+
+This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the Unknown
+to be the concealed author, one must have credited his mask, Will,
+with abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for learning--with about as
+much as he probably possessed.  But the Baconians make him an
+illiterate yokel, and we have quoted Mr. Greenwood's estimate of the
+young Warwickshire provincial.
+
+We all have our personal equations in the way of belief.  That the
+plot of the "nom de plume" should have evaded discovery for a week,
+if the actor were the untutored countryman of the hypotheses, is to
+me, for one, absolutely incredible.  A "concealed poet" looking about
+for a "nom de plume" and a mask behind which he could be hidden,
+would not have selected the name, or the nearest possible approach to
+the name, of an ignorant unread actor.  As he was never suspected of
+not being the author of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a
+country ignoramus, manifestly incapable of poetry, wit, and such
+learning as the plays exhibit.  Every one must judge for himself.
+Mr. Greenwood fervently believes in what I disbelieve. {22a}
+
+"Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves
+at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays .
+. . " says Mr. Greenwood.
+
+Very few care now.  They know the actors' names:  in vain, as a rule,
+do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.
+But in Elizabeth's time the few who cared were apt to care very much,
+and they would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a
+bookless, untaught man, was announced as the author of plays which
+were among the most popular of their day.  The seekers never found
+any other author.  They left no hint that they suspected the
+existence of any other author.  Hence I venture to infer that Will
+seemed to them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite fancy,--no
+scholar to be sure, but very capable of writing the pieces which he
+fathered.
+
+They may all have been mistaken.  Nobody can prove that Heywood and
+Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken.  But
+certain it is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable of
+the works which were attributed to him.  Therefore he cannot possibly
+have been the man who could not write, of the more impulsive
+Baconians; or the bookless, and probably all but Latinless, man of
+Mr. Greenwood's theory.  The positions already seem to me to be
+untenable.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II:  THE "SILENCE" ABOUT SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+
+Before proceeding further to examine Mr. Greenwood's book, and the
+Baconian theories, with the careful attention which they deserve, we
+must clear the ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle
+Baconians, though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the
+problems.
+
+The first question is:  Why, considering that Shakespeare, by the
+consent of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations, was one
+of the world's very greatest poets, have we received so few and such
+brief notices of him from the pens of his contemporaries?
+
+"It is wonderful," exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor, "that hundreds of
+persons should not have left records of him. {27a}  We know nearly as
+much about the most insignificant writer of the period as we know of
+him, but fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.  It is
+senseless to try to account for this otherwise than by recognising
+that the man was not the author."
+
+Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent.  He sees the sixteenth century
+in the colours of the twentieth.  We know nothing, except a few dates
+of birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court, and
+so forth, concerning several of Shakespeare's illustrious
+contemporaries and successors in the art of dramatic poetry.  The
+Baconians do not quite understand, or, at least, keep steadily before
+their minds, one immense difference between the Elizabethan age and
+later times.  In 1590-1630, there was no public excitement about the
+characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men,
+poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs, as
+Spenser did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who did
+not write about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene and
+Nash; who did not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and
+satires, like Ben Jonson; who never killed anybody, as Ben did; nor
+were killed, like Marlowe; nor were involved, like him, in charges of
+atheism, and so forth; nor imprisoned with every chance of having
+their ears and noses slit, like Marston.  Consequently, silence and
+night obscure the lives and personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont,
+Fletcher, Dekker, Webster, and several others, as night and silence
+hide Shakespeare from our view.
+
+He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated
+separately in cheap and very perishable quartos.  No collected
+edition of his plays appeared during his life; without that he could
+not be studied, and recognised in his greatness.  He withdrew to the
+country and died.  There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him;
+nobody Boswellised any playwright of his time.  The Folio of 1623
+gave the first opportunity of studying him as alone he can be
+studied.  The Civil Wars and the Reign of the Saints distracted men's
+minds and depressed or destroyed the Stage.
+
+Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the
+actor at his father's inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and
+cherished the embers of the drama, which were fading before the
+theatres were closed.  Davenant collected what he could in the way of
+information from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean
+anecdotes in conversation; a few reached the late day when uncritical
+inquiries began, say 1680-90 at earliest.  The memories of ancient
+people of the theatre and clerks and sextons at Stratford were
+ransacked, to very little purpose.
+
+As these things were so, how can we expect biographical materials
+about Shakespeare?  As to the man, as to how his character impressed
+contemporaries, we have but the current epithets:  "friendly,"
+"gentle," and "sweet," the praise of his worth by two of the actors
+in his company (published in 1623), and the brief prose note of Ben
+Jonson,--this is more than we have for the then so widely admired
+Beaumont, Ben Jonson's friend, or Chapman, or the adored Fletcher.
+"Into the dark go one and all," Shakespeare and the others.  To be
+puzzled by and found theories on the silence about Shakespeare is to
+show an innocence very odd in learned disputants.
+
+The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own
+misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of
+Shakespeare's time.  That world could not possibly appreciate his
+works as we do; the world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his
+plays in cheap pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled
+and in places unintelligible.  And in not a single instance were
+anecdotes and biographical traits of playwrights recorded, except
+when the men published matter about themselves, or when they became
+notorious in some way unconnected with their literary works.
+Drummond, in Scotland, made brief notes of Ben Jonson's talk;
+Shakespeare he never met.
+
+That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of literary
+merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in no other way
+notorious or eminent.  Mr. Greenwood justly says "the contemporary
+eulogies of the poet afford proof that there were some cultured
+critics of that day of sufficient taste and acumen to recognise, or
+partly recognise, his excellence . . . " {30a}  (Here I omit some
+words, presently to be restored to the text.)  From such critics the
+poet received such applause as has reached us. We also know that the
+plays were popular; but the audiences have not rushed to pen and ink
+to record their satisfaction.  With them, as with all audiences, the
+actors and the SPECTACLE, much more than the "cackle," were the
+attractions.  When Dr. Ingleby says that "the bard of our admiration
+was unknown to the men of that age," he uses hyperbole, and means, I
+presume, that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great
+majority; and that those who knew him in part made no modern fuss
+about him. {31a}
+
+The second puzzle is,--Why did Shakespeare, conscious of his great
+powers, never secure for his collected plays the permanence of print
+and publication?  We cannot be sure that he and his company, in fact,
+did not provide publishers with the copy for the better Quartos or
+pamphlets of separate plays, as Mr. Pollard argues on good grounds
+that they sometimes did. {31b}  For the rest, no dramatic author
+edited a complete edition of his works before Ben Jonson, a scholarly
+man, set the example in the year of Shakespeare's, and of Beaumont's
+death (1616).  Neither Beaumont nor Fletcher collected and published
+their works for the Stage.  The idea was unheard of before Jonson set
+the example, and much of his work lay unprinted till years after his
+death. We must remember the conditions of play-writing in
+Shakespeare's time.
+
+There were then many poets of no mean merit, all capable of admirable
+verse on occasion; and in various degrees possessed of the lofty,
+vigorous, and vivid style of that great age.  The theatre, and
+writing for the theatre, afforded to many men of talent a means of
+livelihood analogous to that offered by journalism among ourselves.
+They were apt to work collectively, several hands hurrying out a
+single play; and in twos or threes, or fours or fives, they often
+collaborated.
+
+As a general rule a play when finished was sold by the author or
+authors to a company of players, or to a speculator like the
+notorious Philip Henslowe, and the new owners, "the grand
+possessors," were usually averse to the publication of the work, lest
+other companies might act it.  The plays were primarily written to be
+acted.  The company in possession could have the play altered as they
+pleased by a literary man in their employment.
+
+To follow Mr. Greenwood's summary of the situation "it would seem
+that an author could restrain any person from publishing his
+manuscript, or could bring an action against him for so doing, so
+long as he had not disposed of his right to it; and that the
+publisher could prevent any other publisher from issuing the work.
+At the same time it is clear that the law was frequently violated . .
+. whether because of the difficulty of enforcing it, or through the
+supineness of authors; and that in consequence authors were
+frequently defrauded by surreptitious copies of their works being
+issued by piratical publishers." {33a}
+
+It may appear that to "authors" we should, in the case of plays, add
+"owners," such as theatrical companies, for no case is cited in which
+such a company brings an action against the publisher of a play which
+they own.  The two players of Shakespeare's company who sign the
+preface to the first edition of his collected plays (1623, "The First
+Folio") complain that "divers stolen and surreptitious copies" of
+single plays have been put forth, "maimed and deformed by the frauds
+and stealths of injurious impostors."  They speak as if they were
+unable to prevent, or had not the energy to prevent, these frauds.
+In the accounts of the aforesaid Henslowe, we find him paying forty
+shillings to a printer to stop or "stay" the printing of a play,
+Patient Grizel, by three of his hacks.
+
+We perhaps come across an effort of the company to prevent or delay
+the publication of The Merchant of Venice, on July 17, 1598, in the
+Stationers' Register.  James Robertes, and all other printers, are
+forbidden to print the book without previous permission from the Lord
+Chamberlain, the protector of Will Shakespeare's company.  Two years
+passed before Robertes issued the book. {34a}  As is well known,
+Heywood, a most prolific playwright, boasts that he never made a
+double sale of his pieces to the players and the press.  Others
+occasionally did, which Heywood clearly thought less than honest.
+
+As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his company,
+Will's interests were the same as theirs.  It is therefore curious
+that some of his pieces were early printed, in quartos, from very
+good copies; while others appeared in very bad copies, clearly
+surreptitious.  Probably the company gave a good MS. copy, sometimes,
+to a printer who offered satisfactory terms, after the gloss of
+novelty was off the acted play. {34b}  In any case, we see that the
+custom and interests of the owners of manuscript plays ran contrary
+to their early publication.  In 1619 even Ben Jonson, who loved
+publication, told Drummond that half of his comedies were still
+unprinted.
+
+These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by ours.
+Whoever wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon;
+whoever legally owned the manuscripts, was equally incurious and
+negligent about the preservation of a correct text.  As we shall see
+later, while Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself
+edited, or gave to Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first
+collected edition (1623), the work has been done in an indescribably
+negligent and reckless manner, and, as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly
+states, the edition, in his opinion, contains at least two plays not
+by his "Shakespeare"--that "concealed poet"--and masses of "non-
+Shakespearean" work.
+
+How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either revised
+the plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an Editor as
+Ben Jonson, I cannot imagine.  This is also one of the difficulties
+in Mr. Greenwood's theory.  Thus we cannot argue, "if the actor were
+the author, he must have been conscious of his great powers.
+Therefore the actor cannot have been the author, for the actor wholly
+neglected to collect his printed and to print his manuscript works."
+
+This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the plays
+by Bacon.  He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished till 1623.  "But
+he could not avow his authorship," cry Baconians, giving various
+exquisite reasons.  Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he might not
+care to divulge his long association with "a cry of players," and a
+man like Will of Stratford.  But he had no occasion to avow it.  He
+had merely to suggest to the players, through any safe channel, that
+they should collect and publish the works of their old friend Will
+Shakspere.
+
+Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he were
+actor or statesman; and the actor, at least, is not to blame for the
+chaos of the first collected edition, made while he was in his grave,
+and while Bacon was busy in revising and superintending Latin
+translations of his works on scientific subjects.
+
+We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of
+Shakspere the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was extreme,
+whether or not he were the author.  The neglect was characteristic of
+the playwrights of his own and the next generation.  In those days it
+was no marvel; few cared.  Nine years passed before a second edition
+of the collected plays appeared:  thirty-two years went by before a
+third edition was issued--years of war and tumult, yet they saw the
+posthumous publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and
+Fletcher.
+
+There remains one more mystery connected with publication.  When the
+first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to
+contain "All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies."  According to
+the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by
+Jonson acting for him.  It contains several plays which, according to
+many critics, are not the author's.  This, if true, is mysterious,
+and so is the fact that a few plays were published, as by
+Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor and of Bacon; plays
+which neither acknowledged for his own, for we hear of no
+remonstrance from--whoever "William Shakespeare" was.  It is
+impossible for me to say why there was no remonstrance.
+
+Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon's plays, under his own name,
+with a slight difference in spelling, to his company.  It was as much
+his interest, in that case, to protest when Bacon's pen-name was
+taken in vain, as if he had spelled his own surname with an A in the
+second syllable.
+
+There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice. {37a}
+In 1599 Jaggard published "The Passionate Pilgrim; W. Shakespeare."
+Out of twenty poems, five only were by W. S.  In 1612, Jaggard added
+two poems by Tom Heywood, retaining W. Shakespeare's name as sole
+author.  "Heywood protested" in print, "and stated that SHAKESPEARE
+was offended, and," says Mr. Greenwood, "very probably he was so; but
+as he was, so I conceive, 'a concealed poet,' writing under a nom de
+plume, he seems to have only made known his annoyance through the
+medium of Heywood."
+
+If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was.  Turning to pp. 348,
+349, we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story, with this
+addition, that the author of the poems published by Jaggard, "to do
+himself right, hath since published them in his own name."  That is,
+W. Shakespeare has since published under his own name such pieces of
+The Passionate Pilgrim as are his own.  "The author, I know," adds
+Heywood, "was much offended with Mr. Jaggard that (altogether unknown
+to him) presumed to make so bold with his name."
+
+Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published W. S.'s
+poems with others NOT by W. S.?
+
+How can anyone explain, by any theory?  It was as open to him in 1599
+as in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own name, or pen-name.
+
+"Here we observe," says Mr. Greenwood, {38a} "that Heywood does
+nothing to identify 'the author with the player.'"  This is, we shall
+see, the eternal argument.  Why should Heywood, speaking of W.
+Shakespeare, explain what all the world knew?  There was no other W.
+Shakespeare (with or without the E and A) but one, the actor, in the
+world of letters of Elizabeth and James.  Who the author was Heywood
+himself has told us, elsewhere:  the author was--Will!
+
+But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name, or,
+when he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or anyone to
+explain.  We do not know the nature of the circumstances in detail;
+we do not know that the poet saw hopes of stopping the sale of the
+works falsely attributed to him.  I do not even feel certain that he
+had not a finger in some of them.  Knowing so little, a more soaring
+wit than mine might fly to the explanation that "Shakespeare" was the
+"nom de plume" of Bacon or his unknown equivalent, and that he
+preferred to "let sleeping dogs lie," or, as Mr. Greenwood might
+quote the Latin tag, said ne moveas Camarinam.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III:  THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE--THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+
+The banner-cry of the Baconians is the word "Impossible!"  It is
+impossible that the actor from Stratford (as they think of him, a
+bookless, untutored lad, speaking in patois) should have possessed
+the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by the author of
+the plays and poems.  It is impossible that at the little Free School
+of Stratford (if he attended it), he should have gained his wide
+knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome.  To these arguments,
+the orthodox Stratfordian is apt to reply, that he finds in the plays
+and poems plenty of inaccurate general information on classical
+subjects, information in which the whole literature of England then
+abounded.  He also finds in the plays some knowledge of certain Latin
+authors, which cannot be proved to have been translated at the date
+when Shakespeare drew on them.  How much Latin Shakespeare knew, in
+our opinion, will presently be explained.
+
+But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must say
+that while the author of the plays had some lore which scholars also
+possessed, he did not use his knowledge like a scholar.  We do not
+see how a scholar could make, as the scansion of his blank verse
+proves that the author did make, the second syllable of the name of
+Posthumus, in Cymbeline, long.  He must have read a famous line in
+Horace thus,
+
+
+"Eheu fugaces Posthoome, Posthoome!"
+
+
+which could scarce 'scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School.
+In the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus
+short, equally impossible.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him Titus Andronicus, but also
+appears to credit it to him, as one of the older plays which he
+"revised, improved, and dressed," {44a} and THAT is taken to have
+been all his "authorship" in several cases.  A scholar would have
+corrected, not accepted, false quantities.  In other cases, as when
+Greeks and Trojans cite Plato and Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida,
+while Plato and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the
+latest conceivable date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly
+suppose that a scholar would have permitted to himself the freak, any
+more than that in The Winter's Tale he should have borrowed from an
+earlier novel the absurdity of calling Delphi "Delphos" (a non-
+existent word), of confusing "Delphos" with Delos, and placing the
+Delphian Oracle in an island.  In the same play the author, quite
+needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492-1546) contemporary
+with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian Apollo.  This,
+at least, would not be ignorance.
+
+We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben's inability to refrain
+from gibes at Shakspere's want of scholarship.  Rowe, who had
+traditions of Davenant's, tells how, in conversation with Suckling,
+Davenant, Endymion Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on Will's
+want of learning; and how Hales snubbed him.  Indeed, Ben could have
+made mirth enough out of The Winter's Tale.  For, granting to Mr.
+Greenwood {45a} that "the mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of
+a much earlier date, and under the reign of Ottocar (1255-78) Bohemia
+extended from the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic," that only
+makes matters far worse.  "Delphos" never was a place-name; there was
+no oracle on the isle of "Delphos"; there were no Oracles in 1255-78
+(A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat for her portrait to Giulio
+Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at Delphos, but not with
+Ottocar.
+
+There never was so mad a mixture, not even in Ivanhoe; not even in
+Kenilworth.  Scott erred deliberately, as he says in his prefaces;
+but Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene, inserted
+Giulio Romano "for his personal diversion," never heard of Ottocar
+(no more than I), and made a delightful congeries of errors in gaiety
+of heart.  Nobody shall convince me that Francis Bacon was so
+charmingly irresponsible; but I cannot speak so confidently of Mr.
+Greenwood's Great Unknown, a severe scholar, but perhaps a frisky
+soul.  There was no region called Bohemia when the Delphic oracle was
+in vigour;--this apology (apparently contrived by Sir Edward
+Sullivan) is the most comic of erudite reflections.
+
+Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita,
+concerning the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was
+carried off by Dis.  How could she, brought up in the hut of a
+Bohemian shepherd, know anything of the Rape of Proserpine?  Why not,
+as she lived in the days of the Delphic Oracle--and Giulio Romano,
+and of printed ballads.
+
+It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer, brought up
+among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire, should have
+created the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and known the style
+of his Armado; and understood how dukes and kings talk among
+themselves--usually in blank verse, it appears.
+
+It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard of the
+"obscure" (sic!) Court of Navarre; and known that at Venice there was
+a place called the Rialto, and a "common ferry" called "the tranect."
+It is impossible that he should have had "an intimate knowledge of
+the castle of Elsinore," though an English troupe of actors visited
+Denmark in 1587.  To Will all this knowledge was impossible; for
+these and many more exquisite reasons the yokel's authorship of the
+plays is a physical impossibility.  But scholars neither invent nor
+tolerate such strange liberties with time and place, with history,
+geography, and common sense.  Will Shakspere either did not know what
+was right, or, more probably, did not care, and supposed, like
+Fielding in the old anecdote, that the audience "would not find it
+out."  How could a scholar do any of these things?  He was as
+incapable of them as Ben Jonson.  Such sins no scholar is inclined
+to; they have, for him, no temptations.
+
+As to Shakspere's schooling, the Baconians point at the current
+ignorance of Stratford-on-Avon, where many topping burgesses, even
+aldermen, "made their marks," in place of signing their names to
+documents.  Shakespeare's father, wife, and daughter "made their
+marks," in place of signing.  So did Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of
+the Earl of Huntly, when she married the cultivated Earl of Bothwell
+(1566).
+
+There is no evidence, from a roll of schoolboys at Stratford Free
+Grammar School, about 1564-77, that any given boy attended it; for no
+roll exists.  Consequently there is no evidence that Will was a
+pupil.
+
+"In the Appendix to Malone's Life of Shakespeare will be found two
+Latin letters, written by alumni of Stratford School contemporary
+with Shakespeare," says Mr. Collins. {48a}  But though the writers
+were Stratford boys contemporary with Shakespeare, in later life his
+associates, as there is no roll of pupils' names how do we know, the
+Baconians may ask, that these men were educated at Stratford School?
+Why not at Winchester, Eton, St. Paul's, or anywhere?  Need one
+reply?
+
+Mr. Collins goes on, in his simple confiding way, to state that "one
+letter is by Abraham Sturley, afterwards an alderman of Stratford . .
+. "  Pursuing the facts, we find that Sturley wrote in Latin to
+"Richard Quiney, Shakespeare's friend," who, if he could read
+Sturley's letter, could read Latin.  Then YOUNG Richard Quiney,
+apparently aged eleven, wrote in Latin to his father.  If young
+Richard Quiney be the son of Shakespeare's friend, Richard Quiney,
+then, of course, his Latin at the age of eleven would only prove
+that, if he were a schoolboy at Stratford, ONE Stratford boy could
+write Latin in the generation following that of Shakespeare.  Thus
+may reason the Baconians.
+
+Perhaps, however, we may say that if Stratford boys contemporary with
+Shakspere, in his own rank and known to him, learned Latin, which
+they retained in manhood, Shakspere, if he went to school with them,
+may have done as much.
+
+Concerning the school, a Free Grammar School, we know that during
+Shakespeare's boyhood the Mastership was not disdained by Walter
+Roche, perhaps a Fellow of what was then the most progressive College
+in learning of those at Oxford, namely, Corpus Christi.  That
+Shakespeare could have been his pupil is uncertain; the dates are
+rather difficult.  I think it probable that he was not, and we do not
+know the qualifications of the two or three succeeding Masters.
+
+As to the methods of teaching and the books read at Grammar Schools,
+abundance of information has been collected.  We know what the use
+was in one very good school, Ipswich, from 1528; in another in 1611;
+but as we do not possess any special information about Stratford
+School, Mr. Greenwood opposes the admission of evidence from other
+academies.  A man might think that, however much the quality of the
+teaching varied in various free schools, the nominal curriculum would
+be fairly uniform.
+
+As to the teacher, a good endowment would be apt to attract a capable
+man.  What was the endowment of Stratford School?  It was derived
+from the bequest of Thomas Jolyffe (died 1482), a bequest of lands in
+Stratford and Dodwell, and before the Reformation the Brethren of the
+Guild were "to find a priest fit and able in knowledge to teach
+grammar freely to all scholars coming to him, taking nothing for
+their teaching . . . "  "The Founder's liberal endowment made it
+possible to secure an income for the Master by deed.  Under the
+Reformation, Somerset's Commission found that the School Master had
+10 pounds yearly by patent; the school was well conducted, and was
+not confiscated." {50a}
+
+Baconians can compare the yearly 20 pounds (the salary in 1570-6,
+which then went much further than it does now) with the incomes of
+other masters of Grammar Schools, and thereby find out if the Head-
+Master was very cheap.  Mr. Elton (who knew his subject intimately)
+calls the provision "liberal."  The Head-Master of Westminster had 20
+pounds and a house.
+
+As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked
+and answered in Latin.  This method, according to Dr. Rouse of Perse
+School, brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current
+fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts vary in opinion.
+The method, I conceive, should give a pupil a vocabulary.  Lilly's
+Latin Grammar was universally used, and was learned by rote, as by
+George Borrow, in the last century.  See Lavengro for details.
+Conversation books, Sententiae Pueriles, were in use; with easy
+books, such as Corderius's Colloquia, and so on, for boys were taught
+to SPEAK Latin, the common language of the educated in Europe.  Waifs
+of the Armada, Spaniards wrecked on the Irish coast, met "a savage
+who knew Latin," and thus could converse with him.  The Eclogues of
+Mantuanus, a Latin poet of the Renaissance (the "Old Mantuan" of
+Love's Labour's Lost), were used, with Erasmus's Colloquia, and, says
+Mr. Collins, "such books as Ovid's Metamorphoses" (and other works of
+his), "the AEneid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and
+portions of Caesar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy."
+
+"Pro-di-gi-ous!" exclaims Mr. Greenwood, {51a} referring to what Mr.
+Collins says Will had read at school.  But precocious Latinity was
+not thought "prodigious" in an age when nothing but Latin was taught
+to boys--not even cricket.  Nor is it to be supposed that every boy
+read in all of these authors, still less read all of their works, but
+these were the works of which portions were read.  It is not
+prodigious.  I myself, according to my class-master, was "a bad and
+careless little boy" at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember
+reading in Ovid and Caesar, and Sallust, while the rest of my time
+was devoted to the total neglect of the mathematics, English "as she
+was taught," History, and whatsoever else was expected from me.
+Shakespeare's time was not thus frittered away; Latin was all he
+learned (if he went to school), and, as he was (on my theory) a very
+clever, imaginative kind of boy, I can conceive that he was intensely
+interested in the stories told by Ovid, and in Catiline's Conspiracy
+(thrilling, if you know your Sallust); and if his interest were once
+aroused, he would make rapid progress.  My own early hatred of Greek
+was hissing and malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was
+changed.  One was intensely interested!
+
+Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr.
+Halliwell-Phillipps, {52a} "Lilly's Grammar, and a few classical
+works chained to the desks of the free schools."  Mr. Collins himself
+gives but "a few classical books," of which PORTIONS were read.  The
+chains were in all the free schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is
+right.  The chains, if authentic, do not count as objections.
+
+Here it must be noted that Mr. Greenwood's opinion of Will's
+knowledge and attainments is not easily to be ascertained with
+precision.  He sees, of course, that the pretension of the extreme
+Baconians--Will could not even write his name--is absurd.  If he
+could not write, he could not pass as the author.  Mr. Greenwood
+"fears that the arguments" (of a most extreme Baconian) "would drive
+many wandering sheep back to the Stratfordian fold." {52b}
+
+He has therefore to find a via media, to present, as the pseudo-
+author, a Will who possessed neither books nor manuscripts when he
+made his Testament; a rustic, bookless Will, speaking a patois, who
+could none the less pass himself off as the author.  So "I think it
+highly probable," says Mr. Greenwood, "that he attended the Grammar
+School at Stratford for four or five years, and that, later in life,
+after some years in London, he was probably able to 'bumbast out a
+line,' and perhaps to pose as 'Poet-Ape who would be thought our
+chief.'" {53a}  Again, "He had had but little schooling; he had
+'small Latin and less Greek'; but he was a good Johannes Factotum, he
+could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, 'bumbast out a blank
+verse.'" {53b}
+
+But this is almost to abandon Mr. Greenwood's case.  Will appears to
+me to be now perilously near acceptance as Greene's "Shake-scene,"
+who was a formidable rival to Greene's three professional
+playwrights:  and quite as near to Ben's Poet-Ape "that would be
+thought our chief," who began by re-making old plays; then won "some
+little wealth and credit on the scene," who had his "works" printed
+(for Ben expects them to reach posterity), and whom Ben accused of
+plagiarism from himself and his contemporaries.  But this Shake-
+scene, this Poet-Ape, is merely our Will Shakespeare as described by
+bitterly jealous and envious rivals.  Where are now the "works" of
+"Poet-Ape" if they are not the works of Shakespeare which Ben so
+nobly applauded later, if they are not in the blank verse of Greene's
+Shake-scene?  "Shakespeare's plays" we call them.
+
+WHEN was it "necessary" for the "Stratford rustic" to "bumbast out a
+blank verse"?  Where are the blank verses which he bumbasted out?
+For what purposes were they bumbasted?  By 1592 "Shake-scene" was
+ambitious, and thought his blank verse as good as the best that
+Greene's friends, including Marlowe, could write.  He had plenty of
+time to practise before the date when, as Ben wrote, "he would be
+thought our chief."  He would not cease to do that in which he
+conceived himself to excel; to write for the stage.
+
+When once Mr. Greenwood deems it "highly probable" that Will had four
+or five years of education at a Latin school, Will has as much of
+"grounding" in Latin, I think, as would account for all the knowledge
+of the Roman tongue which he displays.  His amount of teaching at
+school would carry and tempt even a boy who was merely clever, and
+loved to read romantic tales and comic plays, into Ovid and Plautus--
+English books being to him not very accessible.
+
+Here I may speak from my own memories, for though utterly idle where
+set school tasks were concerned, I tried very early to worry the
+sense out of Aristophanes--because he was said to contain good
+reading.
+
+To this amount of taste and curiosity, nowise unexampled in an
+ordinary clever boy, add GENIUS, and I feel no difficulty as to
+Will's "learning," such as, at best, it was.  "The Stratfordian,"
+says Mr. Greenwood, "will ingeminate 'Genius!  Genius!'" {55a}  I DO
+say "Genius," and stand by it.  The ordinary clever boy, in the
+supposed circumstances, could read and admire his Ovid (though
+Shakespeare used cribs also), the man of genius could write Venus and
+Adonis.
+
+Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily
+on bookless Will's rusticity and patois.  Accepting Ben Jonson's
+account of his "excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
+expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility . . . ," accepting
+the tradition of his lively wit; admitting that he had some Latin and
+literature, I would find in him a sufficiently plausible mask for
+that immense Unknown with a strange taste for furbishing up older
+plays.  I would merely deny to Will his GENIUS, and hand THAT over to
+Bacon--or Bungay.  Believe me, Mr. Greenwood, this is your easiest
+way!--perhaps this IS your way?--the plot of the unscrupulous Will,
+and of your astute Bungay, might thus more conceivably escape
+detection from the pack of envious playwrights.
+
+According to "all tradition," says Mr. Greenwood, Shakespeare was
+taken from school at the age of thirteen.  Those late long-descended
+traditions of Shakespeare's youth are of little value as evidence;
+but, if it pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument,
+accept the whole of them.  Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose
+among the traditions:  all depends on the genealogical steps by which
+they reach us, as far as these can be discovered. {56a}
+
+According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680,
+an opinion concerning Shakspere's education reached him.  It came
+thus; there had been an actor in Shakspere's company, one Phillips,
+who, dying in 1605, left to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling piece
+of gold; and the same "to my servant, Christopher Beeston."
+Christopher's son, William, in 1640, became deputy to Davenant in the
+management of "the King's and Queen's Young Company", and through
+Beeston, according to Aubrey, Davenant learned; through Beeston
+Aubrey learned, that Shakespeare "understood Latin pretty well, for
+he had been in his younger days a school-master in the country."
+Aubrey writes that "old Mr. Beeston, whom Mr. Dryden calls 'the
+chronicle of the stage,'" died in 1682. {56b}
+
+This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions.  Phillips,
+a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher
+Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682;
+he is "the chronicle of the stage."  Through him Davenant gets the
+story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere "knew Latin
+pretty well," and had been a rural dominie.  Mr. Greenwood {57a}
+devotes much space to disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a
+scientific authority, moult s'en faut), but Mr. Greenwood here says
+not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition.  He
+frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration than
+I like.  He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p. 105, but
+there he approached so closely to historical method as to say that
+"Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his
+authority."  On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does not suit
+his book) as "a mere myth."  "HE knows, HE knows" which traditions
+are mythical, and which possess a certain historical value.
+
+My own opinion is that Shakspere did "know Latin pretty well," and
+was no SCHOLAR, as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship.  He left
+school, if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age,
+twelve, when Bacon went to Cambridge.  Will, a clever kind of lad (on
+my theory), left school at an age when some other clever lads became
+freshmen.  Why not?  Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have heard as
+Bishop of Salisbury under William III) took his degree at the age of
+fourteen.
+
+Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing
+to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I
+conceive him to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be
+found the most wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which
+could not but please his "green unknowing youth."  In the years
+before he left Stratford, and after he left school (1577-87?), I can
+easily suppose that he was not ALWAYS butchering calves, poaching,
+and making love; and that, if he could get books in no other way,
+this graceless fellow might be detected on a summer evening, knitting
+his brows over the stories and jests of the chained Ovid and Plautus
+on his old schoolroom desk.  Moi qui parle, I am no genius; but
+stories, romance, and humour would certainly have dragged me back to
+the old desks--if better might not be, and why not Shakspere?  Put
+yourself in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad,
+you liked to steal away into the world of romance, into fairyland.
+
+If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was
+a marvel of genius.  But I am not here claiming for him genius, but
+merely stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and
+romance, had no English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired
+as much power of reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily
+gain in four years of exclusively Latin education, he might continue
+his studies as he pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.
+
+I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians
+insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was
+at a Latin school.  I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity,
+the prompt acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the
+author of the plays must have possessed in youth.  "Tradition says
+nothing of all that," the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he
+likes, turn to my reply in The Traditional Shakespeare. {59a}
+Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after
+date, in a place where literature was NOT of supreme interest, to
+retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did), in
+circumstances of privacy?  As far as I am able to judge, had I been a
+boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing but
+Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and
+romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I
+suppose Shakspere to have possessed.  Yet I could scarcely, like him,
+have made the second syllable in "Posthumus" long!  Sir Walter Scott,
+however, was guilty of similar false quantities:  he and Shakspere
+were about equally scholarly.
+
+I suppose, then, that Shakspere's "small Latin" (as Jonson called it)
+enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read
+sufficient for his uses.  As a fact, he made use of English
+translations, and also of Latin texts.  Scholars like Bacon do not
+use bad translations of easy Latin authors.  If Bacon wanted
+Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation
+of a French translation of a Latin translation.
+
+Some works of Shakespeare, the Lucrece, for example, and The Comedy
+of Errors (if he were not working over an earlier canvas from a more
+learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge of Latin texts
+which in his day had not appeared in published translations, or had
+not been translated at all as far as we know.  In my opinion Will had
+Latin enough to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult,
+for himself.  He could also "get a construe," when in London, or help
+in reading, from a more academic acquaintance:  or buy a construe at
+no high ransom from some poor scholar.  No contemporary calls him
+scholarly; the generation of men who were small boys when he died
+held him for no scholar.  The current English literature of his day
+was saturated with every kind of classical information; its readers,
+even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world of lore with which the
+modern man is seldom acquainted.  The ignorant Baconian marvels:  the
+classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with Elizabethan
+literature is amazed.  Really there is nothing worthy of their
+wonder.
+
+Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him
+"LEARNED"?  He is "sweet," "honey-tongued," "mellifluous," and so
+forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with the
+compliment of "learned."  What Ben Jonson thought of his learning
+(but Ben's standard was very high), what Milton and Fuller, boys of
+eight when he died, thought of his learning, we know.  They thought
+him "Fancy's child" (Milton) and with no claims to scholarship
+(Fuller), with "small Latin and less Greek" (Jonson).  They speak of
+Shakespeare the author and actor; not yet had any man divided the
+persons.
+
+Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the
+classics.  They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense
+as our modern scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr.
+Swinburne among the dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray--if
+I may be pardoned for mentioning contemporary names.  But Elizabethan
+scholarly poets, and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned.
+Perhaps few modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.
+The opinion of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he
+thought Shakespeare's scholarship "inexact," as we shall see.
+
+I conceive that Shakspere "knew Latin pretty well," and, on Ben
+Jonson's evidence, he knew "less Greek."  That he knew ANY Greek is
+surprising.  Apparently he did, to judge from Ben's words.  My
+attitude must, to the Baconians, seem frivolous, vexatious, and
+evasive.  I cannot pretend to know what was Shakspere's precise
+amount of proficiency in Latin when he was writing the plays.  That
+between his own knowledge, and construes given to him, he might
+easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which
+he certainly knew, I believe.
+
+Mr. Greenwood says "the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere
+must have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free
+School is positively amazing." {62a}  But I have shown how an
+imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and
+romances, might continue to read Latin "for human pleasure" after he
+left school.  As a professional writer, in a London where Latinists
+were as common as now they are rare in literary society, he might
+read more, and be helped in his reading.  Any clever man might do as
+much, not to speak of a man of genius.  "And yet, alas, there is no
+record or tradition of all this prodigious industry. . . . "  I am
+not speaking of "prodigious industry," and of that--at school.  In a
+region so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr.
+Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will's early reading
+(even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to exist,
+from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the memories of
+the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none of these
+things.  The thing is not reasonable. {62b}
+
+Let me take one example {62c} of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is
+quoted as saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare's debt to Seneca's
+then untranslated paper De Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I).  It
+inspires Portia's speech about Mercy.  Here I give a version of the
+Latin.
+
+"Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief
+magistrate (principem) . . . No one can think of anything more
+becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed the
+fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher
+office . . . But if the placable and just gods punish not instantly
+with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just
+it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power.
+What?  Holds not he the place nearest to the gods, who, bearing
+himself like the gods, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for
+the better? . . .  Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome
+would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge
+would absolve."
+
+The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia's speech:
+
+
+      "Consider this
+That in the course of Justice none of us
+Should see salvation."
+
+
+Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia's
+eloquence.
+
+Now take Portia:
+
+
+"The quality of Mercy is not strain'd;
+It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
+Upon the place beneath:  it is twice blessed;
+It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;"
+
+
+(Not much Seneca, so far!)
+
+
+"'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
+The throned monarch better than his crown;
+His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
+The attribute to awe and majesty,
+Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
+But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,
+It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
+It is an attribute to God himself;
+And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
+When mercy seasons justice . . . "
+
+
+There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already
+cited, and theological in origin.
+
+Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these
+reflections, without having read Seneca's De Clementia, whether, if
+he could not conceive the ideas "out of his own head," he might not
+hear Seneca's words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or
+read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for
+himself.  Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he
+wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor
+of Nero.
+
+My view of Shakespeare's Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter
+Raleigh. {64a}  As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held
+by people who approach the subject, and who have had a classical
+education.  An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose
+ideas are discussed in the following chapter.
+
+In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns
+did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in
+writing).  Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.
+"His plays," says Sir Walter Raleigh, "are extraordinarily rich in
+the floating debris of popular literature,--scraps and tags and
+broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs.  In this
+respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . .  Edgar and
+Iago, Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear
+and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all
+alike singers of old songs. . . . " {65a}  He is rich in rural
+proverbs NOT recorded in Bacon's Promus.
+
+Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, "was making
+himself all the time."
+
+The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now
+obsolete rural words.  Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all
+the tags of song, ballad, story, and DICTON.  But so may Shakespeare.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV:  MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE'S LEARNING
+
+
+
+That Shakspere, whether "scholar" or not, had a very wide and deep
+knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole
+field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr.
+Greenwood seems to admire in that "violent Stratfordian," Mr. Churton
+Collins. {69a}  I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade classical
+scholars who have never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but
+who consider on their merits the questions:  Does Shakespeare show
+wide classical knowledge?  Does he use his knowledge as a scholar
+would use it?
+
+My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide
+reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay's.  It was his native
+tendency to find coincidences in poetic passages (which, to some, to
+me for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to explain
+coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing.  One remarked in
+him these tendencies long before he wrote on the classical
+acquirements of Shakespeare.
+
+While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of
+authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned
+coincidences.  The question is of the widest range.  Some inquirers
+explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales,
+proverbs, and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a
+single centre (usually India).  Others, like myself, do not deny
+cases of transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and
+independent, though coincident invention.  I do not believe that the
+Arunta of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central
+feature of the myth of Isis and Osiris.
+
+It is not on Shakespeare's use, now and then, of Greek and Latin
+models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins
+himself, and not earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the
+saturation of Shakespeare's mind with Roman and Athenian literature.
+Consequently we can only do justice to Mr. Collins's system, if we
+compare example after example of his supposed instances of
+Shakespeare's borrowing.  This is a long and irksome task; and the
+only fair plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins's Studies in
+Shakespeare, compare the Greek and Roman texts, and weigh each
+example of supposed borrowing for himself.  Baconians must delight in
+this labour.
+
+I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for
+Shakespeare to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays
+of Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use
+the Menaechmi as the model of The Comedy of Errors.  He does not
+borrow phrases from it, as he does from North's Plutarch.
+
+Venus and Adonis owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple
+patches, scattered in different parts of the Metamorphoses.  Lucrece
+is based on the then untranslated Fasti of Ovid.  I do not think
+Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or too
+proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor young
+University man in London.  That is a simple and natural means by
+which he could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or
+poem; and ought not to be overlooked.
+
+Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare's wide and
+profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark:  "Nothing
+which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with
+certainty that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even
+that he possessed enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those
+classics in the Greek text." {71a}  In that case, how did
+Shakespeare's English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins says it
+did, with Greek idioms, while he only knew the Greek plays through
+Latin translations?
+
+However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove
+Shakespeare's close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic
+literature by a method of which he knows the perils--"it is always
+perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may
+be mere coincidences." {72a}  Yet this method is what he practises
+throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for
+himself.
+
+He thinks it "surely not unlikely" that Polonius's
+
+
+"Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
+For loan oft loses both itself and friend,"
+
+
+may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (Trinummus, iv.
+3).  Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there
+were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of the
+borrowers and lenders.
+
+Next, take this of Plautus (Pseudolus, I, iv. 7-10), "But just as the
+poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among
+men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere
+fiction."  We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus's
+theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:
+
+
+"And as imagination bodies forth
+The FORMS of things unknown, the poet's pen
+Turns them to SHAPES, and gives to airy nothing
+A local habitation and a name."
+
+
+The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth FORMS, and the poet's
+pen turns them to SHAPES.  But to suppose that Shakespeare here
+borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.
+
+These are samples of Mr. Collins's methods throughout.
+
+Of Terence there were translations--first in part; later, in 1598, of
+the whole.  Of Seneca there was an English version (1581).  Mr.
+Collins labours to show that one passage "almost certainly" implies
+Shakespeare's use of the Latin; but it was used "by an inexact
+scholar,"--a terribly inexact scholar, if he thought that "alienus"
+("what belongs to another") meant "slippery"!
+
+Most of the passages are from plays (Titus Andronicus and Henry VI,
+i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually) to HIS author,
+the Great Unknown.  Throughout these early plays Mr. Collins takes
+Shakespeare's to resemble Seneca's LATIN style:  Shakespeare, then,
+took up Greek tragedy in later life; after the early period when he
+dealt with Seneca.  Here is a sample of borrowing from Horace,
+"Persicos odi puer apparatus" (Odes. I, xxxviii. I).  Mr. Collins
+quotes Lear (III, vi. 85) thus, "You will say they are PERSIAN
+ATTIRE."  Really, Lear in his wild way says to Edgar, "I do not like
+the fashion of your garments:  you will say they are Persian; but let
+them be changed."  Mr. Collins changes this into "you will say they
+are PERSIAN ATTIRE," a phrase "which could only have occurred to a
+classical scholar."  The phrase is not in Shakespeare, and Lear's
+wandering mind might as easily select "Persian" as any other
+absurdity.
+
+So it is throughout.  Two great poets write on the fear of death, on
+the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination in
+nature, on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas,
+glorified by poetry,--and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from
+Lucretius or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out
+and study the Latin passages which he does not quote.  So arbitrary
+is taste in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but
+independently, finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the
+Alcibiades I of Plato into the mouth of Achilles in Troilus and
+Cressida, while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is
+from Seneca--where Mr. Collins does not find "the smallest parallel."
+Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author of Troilus makes Ulysses
+quote Plato as "the author" of a remark, and makes Achilles take up
+the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.
+
+Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
+taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by
+the Achaeans!
+
+There were Latin translations of Plato; the Alcibiades I was
+published apart, from Ficinus' version, in 1560, with the sub-title,
+Concerning the Nature of Man.  Who had read it?--Shakespeare, or one
+of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another Troilus and
+Cressida (now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood's Unknown?  Which of
+these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived long
+before Homer?  Which of them followed the Ionic and mediaeval anti-
+Achaean view of Homer's heroes, as given in the Troy Books of the
+Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired Odysseus, whom
+the Ionian tradition abhors?  Troilus and Cressida is indeed a
+mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus' version of
+the Alcibiades; {75a} and yet made the monstrous anachronism of
+dating Aristotle and Plato before the Trojan war.  "That was his
+fun," as Charles Lamb said in another connection.
+
+Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the "small Latin"
+with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare.  He could read
+Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads
+French--that is, as easily as he reads English.  Still further,
+Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the
+Greek drama "that the characteristics which differentiate his work
+from the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work
+of the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these
+dramatists."
+
+Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as
+far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much
+acquaintance with Euripides, AEschylus, Sophocles, and do not often
+remind us of these masters.  Shakespeare does remind us of them--the
+only question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession of a
+genius akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with all
+the treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling
+up through the wells of Avon?
+
+But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, CANNOT be
+demonstrated) that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic
+tragedians?  He begins by saying that he will not bottom his case "on
+the ground of parallels in sentiment and reflection, which, as they
+express commonplaces, are likely to be" (fortuitous) "coincidences."
+Three pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow.
+"Curiously close similarities of expression" are also barred.  Four
+pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and AEschylus,
+plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!).  Again,
+"identities of sentiment under similar circumstances" are not to be
+cited; two pages ARE cited; and "similarities, however striking they
+may be in metaphorical expression," cannot safely be used; several
+pages of them follow.
+
+Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the Aias of Sophocles,
+and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from Titus
+Andronicus, which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-
+Shakespearean, or not by his unknown great author.  Troilus and
+Cressida, whatever part Shakespeare may have had in it, does suggest
+to me that the author or authors knew of Homer no more than the few
+books of the Iliad, first translated by Chapman and published in
+1598.  But he or they did know the Aias of Sophocles, according to
+Mr. Collins:  so did the author of Romeo and Juliet.
+
+Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks
+are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare
+knew the Greek tragedians.  "We have obviously to be on our guard"
+{77a} against three kinds of such parallels, which "may be mere
+coincidences," {77b} fortuitous coincidences.  But these coincidences
+against which "we must be on our guard" fill sixteen pages (pp. 46-
+63).  These pages must necessarily produce a considerable effect in
+the way of persuading the reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek
+tragedians as intimately as Mr. Collins did.  Mr. Greenwood is
+obliged to leave these parallels to readers of Mr. Collins's essay.
+Indeed, what more can we do?  Who would read through a criticism of
+each instance?  Two or three may be given.  The Queen in Hamlet
+reminds that prince, grieving for his father's death, that "all that
+live must die":
+
+
+"That loss is common to the race,
+And common is the common-place."
+
+The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra,--and here is a
+parallel!  Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious
+expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof.  Greece
+agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that
+it is not lucky to be "a corby messenger" of bad news; or that all
+goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that we suffer
+most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there is
+strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an idea
+common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or
+that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like
+again,--and so on as long as you please.  Of such wisdom are proverbs
+made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs.
+Vestigia nulla retrorsum is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.
+Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that
+Shakespeare was saturated in Greek tragedy.  But page on page of such
+facts as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of "the belly-
+pinched wolf," the other of "the empty-bellied wolf," are apt to
+impress the reader--and verily both Shakespeare and AEschylus talk of
+"the heart dancing for joy."  Mr. Collins repeats that such things
+are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up.  It was a theory of
+Shakespeare's time that the apparent ghost of a dead man might be an
+impersonation of him by the devil.  Hamlet knows this -
+
+
+"The spirit that I have seen may be the devil."
+
+
+Orestes (Electra, Euripides) asks whether it may not be an avenging
+daemon (alastor) in the shape of a god, that bids him avenge his
+father.  Is Shakespeare borrowing from Euripides, or from a sermon,
+or any contemporary work on ghosts, such as that of Lavater?
+
+A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in
+Romeo and Juliet, and in Euripides, both say that Death is her
+bridegroom.  Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the Greek
+Anthology -
+
+
+"For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone."
+
+
+One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels.
+But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove
+that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin
+translations.
+
+To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such
+commonplaces:  as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their
+latest day in life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their
+own names.
+
+The situations, in Hamlet and the Choephorae and Electra, are so
+close that resemblances in some passages must and do occur, and Mr.
+Collins does not comment specially upon the closest resemblance of
+all:  the English case is here the murder of Duncan, the Greek is the
+murder of Agamemnon.
+
+Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels
+between Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between
+Homer and Beowulf and the Njal's saga, yet Norsemen and the early
+Irish were not students of Homer!  The parallel passages in Homer, on
+one side, and the Old Irish Tain Bo Cualgne, and the Anglo-Saxon
+epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing from
+Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar.  But no
+student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found, I
+think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels
+knew Greek.  The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick's The Heroic
+Age (1912), especially Chapter XV, "The Common Characteristics of
+Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry," and to what Mr. Chadwick says much
+might be added.
+
+But, to be short, Mr. Collins's case can only be judged by readers of
+his most interesting Studies in Shakespeare.  To me, Hamlet's
+soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the Phoenix of Euripides
+no more closely than two sets of reflections by great poets on the
+text that "of death we know nothing" are bound to do,--though
+Shakespeare's are infinitely the richer.  For Shakespeare's
+reflections on death, save where Christians die in a Christian
+spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-AEschylean Greek and
+early Anglo-Saxon poets.  In many respects, as Mr. Collins proves,
+Shakespeare's highest and deepest musings are Greek in tone.  But of
+all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in his art was Keats,
+who of Greek knew nothing.  In the same way, a peculiar vein of
+Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely
+Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian
+poet's lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from
+Mimnermus!  There is such a thing as congruity of genius.  Mr.
+Collins states the hypothesis--not his own--"that BY A CERTAIN
+NATURAL AFFINITY Shakespeare caught also the accent and tone as well
+as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek tragedy."
+
+Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins's long array of Greek
+parallels, I do hold that by "natural affinity," by congruity of
+genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great Athenians.
+
+One thing seems certain to me.  If Shakspere read and borrowed from
+Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins knew
+it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins's extraordinary
+tenacity of memory.
+
+Now if "Shakespeare" did all that, he was not the actor.  The author,
+on Mr. Collins's showing, must have been a very sedulous and diligent
+student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to its
+fragments.  The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove, from
+Bacon's works, that he was such a student.
+
+Mr. Collins, "a violent Stratfordian," overproved his case.  If his
+proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians as
+well as did Mr. Swinburne.  If the author of the plays were so
+learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion--he WAS, in the
+opinion of Mr. Collins.
+
+If Shakespeare's spirit and those of Sophocles and AEschylus meet, it
+is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey with "the
+poet's sad lucidity" the same "pageant of men's miseries."  But how
+dissimilar in expression Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart
+from the austerity of Greece, we observe in one of Mr. Collins's
+parallels.
+
+Polynices, in the Phoenissae of Euripides (504-506), exclaims:
+
+
+"To the stars' risings, and the sun's I'd go,
+And dive 'neath earth,--if I could do this thing, -
+Possess Heaven's highest boon of sovereignty."
+
+
+Then compare Hotspur:
+
+
+"By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
+To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,
+Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
+Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
+And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
+So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear
+Without corrival all her dignities."
+
+
+What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur's mind!  Is
+Shakespeare thinking of the Phoenissae, or is he speaking only on the
+promptings of his genius?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V:  SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY
+
+
+
+A phrase has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare's
+work, namely, "congruity of genius," which is apt to be resented by
+Baconians.  Perhaps they have a right to resent it, for "genius" is
+hard to define, and genius is invoked by some wild wits to explain
+feats of Shakespeare's which (to Baconians) appear "miracles."  A
+"miracle" also is notoriously hard to define; but we may take it
+("under all reserves") to stand for the occurrence of an event, or
+the performance of an action which, to the speaker who applies the
+word "miracle," seems "impossible."  The speaker therefore says, "The
+event is impossible; miracles do not happen:  therefore the reported
+event never occurred.  The alleged performance, the writing of the
+plays by the actor, was impossible, was a miracle, therefore was done
+by some person or persons other than the actor."  This idea of the
+IMPOSSIBILITY of the player's authorship is the foundation of the
+Baconian edifice.
+
+I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood's
+view of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere.  If
+Will were what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will's authorship of
+the plays seems to me, "humanly speaking," impossible.  But then Mr.
+Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance
+that Will MAY have been, not merely "a sharp boy" but a boy of great
+parts; and not without a love of stories and poetry:  a passion
+which, in a bookless region, could only be gratified through folk-
+song, folk-tale, and such easy Latin as he might take the trouble to
+read.  If we add to these very unusual but not wholly impossible
+tastes and abilities, that Will MAY have been a lad of genius, there
+is no more "miracle" in his case than in other supreme examples of
+genius.  "But genius cannot work miracles, cannot do what is
+impossible."  Do what is impossible to whom?  To the critics, the men
+of common sense.
+
+Alas, all this way of talking about "miracles," and "the impossible,"
+and "genius" is quite vague and popular.  What do we mean by
+"genius"?  The Latin term originally designates, not a man's everyday
+intellect, but a spirit from without which inspires him, like the
+"Daemon," or, in Latin, "Genius" of Socrates, or the lutin which rode
+the pen of Moliere.  "Genius" is claimed for Shakespeare in an
+inscription on his Stratford monument, erected at latest some six
+years after his death.  Following this path of thought we come to
+"inspiration":  the notion of it, as familiar to Australian savages
+as to any modern minds, is that, to the poet, what he produces is
+GIVEN by some power greater than himself, by the Boilyas (spirits) or
+Pundjel, the Father of all.  This palaeolithic psychology, of course,
+is now quite discredited, yet the term "genius" is still (perhaps
+superstitiously) applied to the rare persons whose intellectual
+faculties lightly outrun those of ordinary mortals, and who do
+marvels with means apparently inadequate.
+
+In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put--in
+place of the Muses or the Boilyas, or the Genius--what they call the
+"Subliminal Self," something "far more deeply interfused than the
+everyday intellect."  This subconscious self, capable of far more
+than the conscious intelligence, is genius.
+
+On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only
+higher in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday
+intellect which, for example, pens this page.
+
+Thus as soon as we begin to speak of "genius," we are involved in
+speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical;
+in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by
+physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical
+research, or by the study of heredity.  When I speak of "the genius
+of Shakespeare," of Jeanne d'Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I
+possibly have a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of
+Mr. Greenwood, when he uses the term "genius"; so we are apt to
+misunderstand each other.  Yet we all glibly use the term "genius,"
+without definition and without discussion.
+
+At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against "that fool of a word,"
+as Napoleon said, "impossible."  At once, on either side, we assume
+that we know what is possible and what is impossible,--and so pretend
+to omniscience.
+
+Thus some "Stratfordians," or defenders of the actor's authorship,
+profess to know--from all the signed work of Bacon, and from all that
+has reached us about Bacon's occupations and preoccupations, from
+1590 to 1605--that the theory of Bacon's authorship of the plays is
+"impossible."  I, however, do not profess this omniscience.
+
+On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that HE knows, or
+thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor's education, conditions
+of life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of the actor
+is "impossible."
+
+Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much
+more about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in
+his life, than we know about the actor; while about "the
+potentialities of genius," we know--very little.
+
+Thus, with all Bacon's occupations and preoccupations, he had, the
+Baconians will allow, GENIUS.  By the miracle of genius he MAY have
+found time and developed inclination, to begin by furbishing up older
+plays for a company of actors:  he did it extremely well, but what a
+quaint taste for a courtier and scholar!  The eccentricities of
+genius MAY account for his choice of a "nom de plume," which, if he
+desired concealment, was the last that was likely to serve his turn.
+He may also have divined all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys
+and Pistols, whom, conceivably, he did not much frequent.
+
+I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written Hamlet
+"if he had the mind," as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth.  Not at
+all; I am the last to limit the potentialities of genius.
+
+But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too
+had genius in that amazing degree which, in Henry V, the Bishop of
+Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss in the case
+of the young king.  In this passage we perceive that the poet had
+brooded over and been puzzled by the "miracle" (he uses the word) of
+genius.  Says Canterbury speaking of the Prince's wild youth,
+
+
+"Never was such a sudden scholar made."
+
+
+One Baconian objection to Shakespeare's authorship is that during his
+early years in London (say 1587-92) he was "such a sudden scholar
+made" in various things.
+
+The young king's
+
+
+   "addiction was to courses vain,
+His companies unletter'd, rude, and shallow,"
+
+
+precisely like Shakespeare's courses and companions at Stratford
+
+
+"Had never noted in him any study."
+
+
+Stratford tradition, a century after Shakespeare left the town, did
+not remember "any study" in him; none had been "noted," nor could
+have been remembered.  To return to Henry, he shines in divinity,
+knowledge of "commonwealth affairs,"
+
+
+"You would say, it hath been all in all his study."
+
+
+He is as intimate with the art of war; to him "Gordian knots of
+policy" are "familiar as his garter."  He MUST have
+
+
+"The art and practic part of life,"
+
+
+as "mistress to this theorie,"
+
+
+"Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,"
+
+
+as his youth was riotous, and was lived in all men's gaze,
+
+
+"And never noted in him any study,
+Any retirement, any sequestration
+From open haunts and popularity."
+
+
+The Bishop of Ely can only suggest that Henry's study or
+"contemplation"
+
+
+"Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
+Unseen,"
+
+
+and Canterbury says
+
+
+"It must be so, for miracles are ceased."
+
+
+And thus the miracle of genius baffles the poet, for Henry's had been
+"noisy nights," notoriously noisy.
+
+Now, as we shall later show, Bacon's rapid production of the plays,
+considering his other contemporary activities and varied but always
+absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as the sudden blossoming
+of Henry's knowledge and accomplishments; for all Bacon's known
+exertions and occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing
+interest, were remote from the art of tragedy and comedy.  If we are
+to admit the marvel of genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits we
+know much, by parity of reasoning we may grant that the actor, of
+whom we know much less, may have had genius:  had powers and could
+use opportunities in a way for which Baconians make no allowance.
+
+We now turn to Mr. Greenwood's chapter, "Shakespeare and 'Genius.'"
+It opens with the accustomed list of poor Will's disqualifications,
+"a boy born of illiterate parents," but we need not rehearse the
+list. {91a}  He "comes to town" (date unknown) "a needy adventurer";
+in 1593 appeared the poem Venus and Adonis, author's name being
+printed as "W. Shakespeare."  Then comes Lucrece (1594).  In 1598
+Love's Labour's Lost, printed as "corrected and augmented" by "W.
+Shakespere."  And so on with all the rest.  Criticism of the learning
+and splendour of the two poems follows.  To Love's Labour's Lost, and
+the amusing things written about it by Baconians, I return; and to
+Shakespeare's "impossible" knowledge of courtly society, his "polish
+and urbanity," his familiar acquaintance with contemporary French
+politics, foreign proverbs, and "the gossip of the Court" of
+Elizabeth:  these points are made by His Honour Judge Webb.
+
+All this lore to Shakespeare is "impossible"--he could not read, say
+some Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none; on these points
+I have said my say.  The omniscient Baconians know that all the early
+works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a man of, say thirty-
+-who WAS no more, and KNEW no more, than they know that the actor was
+and knew; and as for "Genius," it cannot work miracles.  Genius
+"bestows upon no one a knowledge of facts," "Shakespeare, however
+favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned."
+
+Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness) has a
+way of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary "dull
+intelligent man" gains none.  Keen interest, keen curiosity, swift
+observation, even the power of tearing out the things essential from
+a book, the gift of rapid reading; the faculty of being alive to the
+fingertips,--these, with a tenacious memory, may enable a small boy
+to know more facts of many sorts than his elders and betters and all
+the neighbours.  They are puzzled, if they make the discovery of his
+knowledge.  Scott was such a small boy; whether we think him a man of
+genius or not.  Shakspere, even the actor, was, perhaps, a man of
+genius, and possessed this power of rapid acquisition and vivid
+retention of all manner of experience and information.  To what I
+suppose to have been his opportunities in London, I shall return.
+Meanwhile, let the doubter take up any popular English books of
+Shakespeare's day:  he will find them replete with much knowledge
+wholly new to him--which he will also find in Shakespeare.
+
+A good example is this:  Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of
+scientific lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were
+much on a level.  Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the
+facts staggered him, as a "Stratfordian."  A friend told me that he
+too was equally moved.  I replied that these pseudoscientific "facts"
+had long been commonplaces.  Pliny was a rich source of them.
+Professor Dowden took the matter up, with full knowledge, {93a} and
+reconverted Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote:  "I am not versed in the
+literature of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians
+who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the
+coincidences were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the
+poet.  Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so." {93b}
+
+Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by
+requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers's papers on "The
+Mechanism of Genius" (in his Human Personality), and to consider the
+humble problem of "Calculating Boys," which is touched on also by
+Cardinal Newman.  How do they, at the age of innocence, arrive at
+their amazing results?  How did the child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid,
+work out the Euclidean propositions of "bars and rounds," as he
+called lines and circles?  Science has no solution!
+
+Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of
+human nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners
+and matter of war) Jeanne d'Arc;--and science, I fancy, is much to
+seek for a reply.
+
+Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns.  The
+parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much to
+Mr. Greenwood's advantage as he supposes.  The genius of Burns, of
+course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author of the
+Shakespearean plays.  But that author and Burns have this in common
+with each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work arises
+from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier
+artists.  Burns almost always has a key-note already touched, as
+confessedly in the poems of his predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton
+of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or artistic, and so forth.  He
+"alchemised" his materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of his author of
+the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into marble.  Notoriously
+much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.
+
+The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish
+school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek;
+in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and
+French; and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry's Wallace;
+Locke's Essay; The Spectator, novels of the day, and vernacular Scots
+poets of his century, with a world of old Scots songs.  These things,
+and such as these, were Burns's given literary materials.  He used
+them in the only way open to him, in poems written for a rural
+audience, and published for an Edinburgh public.  No classical, no
+theatrical materials were given; or, if he read the old drama, he
+could not, in his rural conditions, and in a Scotland where the
+theatre was in a very small way, venture on producing plays, for
+which there was no demand, while he had no knowledge of the Stage.
+Burns found and filled the only channels open to him, in a printed
+book, and in music books for which he transmuted old songs.
+
+The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with
+reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical;
+and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to
+him was the theatre.  Badly as it paid the outside author, there was
+nothing that paid better.  Venus and Adonis brought "more praise than
+pudding," if one may venture a guess.  With the freedom of the
+theatre Will could soar to all heights and plumb all depths.  No such
+opportunity had Burns, even if he could have used it, and, owing to a
+variety of causes, his spirit soon ceased to soar high or wing wide.
+
+I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current
+Elizabethan light literature--Euphues, Lyly's Court comedies, novels
+full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney--his Defence
+of Poesy, and Arcadia (1590)--with scores of tales translated from
+the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full of foreign society, and
+discourses of knights and ladies.  He saw the plays of the day,
+perhaps as one of "the groundlings."  He often beheld Society, from
+without, when acting before the Queen and at great houses.  He had
+thus, if I am right, sufficient examples of style and manner, and
+knowledge of how the great were supposed (in books) to comport and
+conduct themselves.  The books were cheap, and could be borrowed, and
+turned over at the booksellers' stalls. {96a}  The Elizabethan style
+was omnipresent.  Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover
+of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily
+influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that my
+conjectures are not too audacious.  Not only "the man in the street,"
+but "the reading public" (so loved by Coleridge), have not the
+beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man reads.  Watch
+them poring for hours over a newspaper!  Let me quote what Sir Walter
+Raleigh says:  {97a} "Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly
+readers who know what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is
+dressed in print, but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of
+all that brings them new information, or jumps with their thought, or
+tickles their fancy.  Such a reader will have done with a volume in a
+few minutes, yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years.  He is
+a live man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned
+man."
+
+I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was
+Dr. Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.
+The accomplishment is only a marvel to--well, I need not be
+particular about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!
+
+Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
+passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will,
+quoted by Mr. Greenwood {97b} from Mr. Morgan. {97c}
+
+Genius, says Mr. Morgan, "did not guide Burns's untaught pen to write
+of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus."  No! that was not Burns's
+lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the
+contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The
+Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume,
+his friend.  The public of 1780-90 did not want new epics of heroic
+Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full
+of the mediaeval legends of Troy and Athens.  But the popular
+literature accessible to Will was full of the mediaeval legends of
+Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, NOT of Homer, Will made his
+market.  Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch's
+Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only
+Iliad VII., in Chapman's new translation (1598).  For the rest he had
+Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton's Destruction of Troy,
+still reprinted as a POPULAR book as late as 1713.  Will did not, as
+Mr. Morgan says, "reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and
+manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand
+years before he had been begotten. . . "  He bestowed the manners of
+mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks.  He
+accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke.  He gave Scotland cannon
+three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.
+Look at his notion of "the very manners" of early post-Roman Britain
+in Cymbeline and King Lear!  Concerning "the anomalous status of a
+King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings" the author of
+Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual
+truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man
+slain in a blacksmith's bothy), and of the whole affair, the author
+knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends.  The author of
+the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that
+he had) of "matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or
+dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather
+than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!"
+
+Mon Dieu! do historians NOT treat of "matters of curious research"
+and of statutes and of treaties?  As for "old romances," they were
+current and popular.  The "occult" sources of King Lear are a popular
+tale attached to legendary "history" and a story in Sidney's Arcadia.
+Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as "a letterless peasant lad," or the
+Author, whoever he was, is not "invested with all the love" (sic,
+v.1. "lore"), "which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books
+and buried and forgotten."
+
+"Our friend's style has flowery components," Mr. Greenwood adds to
+this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author, "and yet
+Shakespeare who did all this," et caetera.  But Shakespeare did NOT
+do "all this"!  We know the sources of the plays well enough:  novels
+in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo;
+Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out
+of the French; older plays, and the rest of it.  Shakespeare does not
+go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to
+the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-
+plays to the State Papers.  Shakespeare did not, like William of
+Deloraine, dig up "clasped books, buried and forgotten."  There is no
+original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and
+popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.
+Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot
+what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence.  And the common
+Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.
+
+But Mr. Greenwood asks "what was the poetic output?" in Burns's case.
+{100a}  It was what we know, and THAT was what suited his age and his
+circumstances.  It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not
+drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one
+winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of
+literature.
+
+Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have
+suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.
+I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-
+pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the
+wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from
+the great banquet of the classics,--with such history, wholly
+uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English
+chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners
+mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current
+popular Morte d'Arthur and Destruction of Troy.
+
+I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that "Genius is a
+potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what
+it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is
+associated, and the opportunities that are open to it--in a word, on
+the circumstances of its environment." {101a}
+
+Of course by "moral qualities," a character without spot or stain is
+not intended:  we may take that for granted.  Otherwise, I agree; and
+think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it
+produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and
+with "the circumstances of its environment."  Without the
+"environment," no Jeanne d'Arc,--without the environment, no
+Shakespeare.
+
+To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of "the light
+people," the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature,
+like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions
+of their pens:  the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all,
+the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers'
+tales, the seamen's company, the vision of the Court, the gallants,
+the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in
+the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was.  Not as
+an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does
+not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob.  Like Alceste
+(in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,
+
+
+"L'Ami du genre humain n'est point du tout mon fait."
+
+
+In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob.  This
+reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study-
+haunting, or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms
+haunting Bacon make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll
+Tearsheet, and drawers, and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and
+copper captains, and all Shakespeare's crowd of people hanging loose
+on the town?
+
+It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and
+manners of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and
+conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge
+of what is called "low life."
+
+If you reply, as regards Bacon, "his genius divined the Costards and
+Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and
+Bardolphs, and carters, from a hint or two, a glance," I answer that
+Will had much better sources for THEM in his own experience of life,
+and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers--of whom, in
+the quick, he saw quite as much as Moliere did of his Marquis.
+
+But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting for
+Bacon's pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by Lord
+Penzance, that aged Judge.  The way is short.  These pictures of
+rural life and character were interpolated into the plays of Bacon by
+his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, "who prepared the plays
+for the stage."  This brilliant suggestion is borrowed from Mr.
+Appleton Morgan. {103a}
+
+Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it IS difficult to see
+how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of
+character which he could scarcely draw "from the life."  I am willing
+to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited
+give the honour to the actor, "who prepared the plays for the stage."
+
+Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I
+believe in "Genius."  Shakespeare and Moliere did not live in
+"Society," though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over
+the invisible barrier between the actor and the great people in whose
+houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer.  The rest they
+divined, by genius.
+
+Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
+Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not
+at Court, not in the study, did he meet them.  How then did he create
+his multitude of very low-lived persons?  Rustics and rural
+constables he MAY have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his
+collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer
+company.  So you have to admit "Genius,"--the miracle of "Genius" in
+your Bacon,--to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of
+my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will
+collaborated with Bacon.
+
+Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
+different genius, education, and environment.  Burns could easily get
+at the Press, and be published:  that was impossible for Shakespeare
+at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics.  Suppose him to be a
+poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist.  Tradition at Stratford says
+something about the humorist, and tradition, IN SIMILAR
+CIRCUMSTANCES, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the
+lapse of seventy years.
+
+Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am
+obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school
+at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man,
+flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and
+Quiney.  Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen,
+he could not break so lightly as Burns did,--some outlying deer he
+could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he
+assailed other deer, and was in troubles many.  Unlike Burns, he had
+a keen eye for the main chance.  Everything was going to ruin with
+his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow
+tradition), was not satisfactory.  His opinion of dominies, if he
+wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in
+fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.
+
+Something must be done!  Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny
+that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have
+seen and talked with them, and been attracted.  He was a practical
+man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him
+heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and
+organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies.  According to Ben
+Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his
+rustic accent, that terrible bar!  The actors find that out; he is
+admitted within the house as a "servitor"--a call-boy, if you like;
+an apprentice, if you please.
+
+By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, "Shakescene" thinks he
+can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is
+also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of
+the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene's three author
+friends:  whoever they were, they were professional University
+playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was
+one of them.
+
+Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say,
+five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with
+the stage.  Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good
+deal of very mixed society--writing men, bookish young blades, young
+blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom
+of the gallants.
+
+What follows?  Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps,
+after the play, if an actor seems to be good company.  This is quite
+natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to
+stand aloof from any amusing company.  They found it among prize-
+fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact
+that he was a lord.  Moreover there were no women on the stage to
+distract the attention of the gallants.  The players, says Asinius
+Lupus, in Jonson's Poetaster, "corrupt young gentry very much, I know
+it."  I take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. {106a}  They could not
+corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them.
+From Ben's Poetaster, which bristles with envy of the players, Mr.
+Greenwood also quotes a railing address by a copper captain to
+Histrio, a poor actor, "There are some of you players honest,
+gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha' some wit, as well as
+your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests; AND ARE
+COMPANIONS FOR GALLANTS.  A man may skelder ye, now and then, of half
+a dozen shillings or so." {107a}  We think of Nigel Olifaunt in The
+Fortunes of Nigel; but better gallants might choose to have some
+acquaintance with Shakespeare.
+
+To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse
+acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to
+show misunderstanding of human nature.  The players were, when
+unprotected by men of rank, "vagabonds."  The citizens of London,
+mainly Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not
+Puritans.  The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in
+palaces and great houses.  The wealth and splendid attire of the
+actors, their acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the
+sweated playwrights.  Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge
+"Parnassus" plays of c. 1600-2.  In the mouth of Will Kempe, who
+acted Dogberry in Shakespeare's company, and was in favour, says
+Heywood, with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag:
+"For Londoners, who of more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe?
+He is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will
+Kempe."  It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson
+came to be, as much "in Society" as is possible for a mere literary
+man.  I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour.  He was a
+man's man, a peer might be interested in him as easily as in a
+jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que scais-je?
+Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more
+interested, interested in a better way.
+
+In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human
+nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young,
+handsome, popular Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and
+interested himself in the poet.  There followed the dedication to the
+Earl of Venus and Adonis; a poem likely to please any young amorist
+(1693).
+
+Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an
+Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate.  The
+mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that of
+Lucrece, proves that the Earl did not share the surprise of Mr.
+Greenwood.  He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew the real
+concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym.  But of the
+hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said.
+Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable
+to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we
+are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have
+left any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.
+
+This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair.
+But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or "patronage" of
+Southampton "not a scrap of evidence exists." {109a}  Where would Mr.
+Greenwood expect to find a scrap of evidence?  In literary anecdote?
+Of contemporary literary anecdote about Shakespeare, as about
+Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and Fletcher, there is none, or
+next to none.  There is the tradition that Southampton gave the poet
+1000 pounds towards a purchase to which he had a mind.  (Rowe seems
+to have got this from Davenant,--through Betterton.)  In what
+documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of evidence?
+Perhaps in Southampton's book of his expenditure, and that does not
+exist.  It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find him, poor
+as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
+
+As to the chances of an actor's knowing "smart people," Heywood, who
+knew all that world, tells us {109b} that "Tarleton, in his time, was
+gracious with the Queen, his sovereign," Queen Elizabeth.  "Will
+Kempe was in the favour of his sovereign."
+
+THEY had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians.
+I am not pretending that, though his
+
+
+   "flights upon the banks of Thames
+So did take Eliza and our James,"
+
+
+Will Shakspere "was gracious with the Queen."
+
+We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players
+address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.  They have the audacity
+to say nothing about having asked and received permission to
+dedicate.  They say that the Earls "have prosecuted both the plays
+and their authour living" (while in life) "with much favour."  They
+"have collected and published the works of 'the dead' . . . only to
+keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow" (associate)
+"as was our Shakespeare, 'your servant Shakespeare.'"
+
+Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor's
+authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls
+held him.  Mr. Greenwood {110a} supposes that Jonson wrote the
+Preface, which contains an allusion to a well-known ode of Horace,
+and to a phrase of Pliny.  Be that as it may, the Preface signed by
+the two players speaks to Pembroke and Montgomery.  To THEM it cannot
+lie; THEY know whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they
+believed, or not, that the plays were their "servant's."  How is Mr.
+Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors, to the
+identity of their late "Fellow" the player, with the author; and to
+the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and his compositions?
+Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may reasonably suppose Ben
+to have written the dedication which the players signed. {111a}
+
+Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare,
+the dedication does not say in so many words.  They had seen his
+plays and had "favoured" both him and them, with so much favour, had
+"used indulgence" to the author.  That is not nearly explicit enough
+for the precise Baconians.  But the Earls knew whether what was said
+were true or false.  I am not sure whether the Baconians regard them
+as having been duped as to the authorship, or as fellow-conspirators
+with Ben in the great Baconian joke and mystery--that "William
+Shakespeare" the author is not the actor whose Stratford friend,
+Collyns, has his name written in legal documents as "William
+Shakespeare."
+
+Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere
+was acting in a company (1592-3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote
+Venus and Adonis, and, signing "W. Shakspeare," dedicated it to his
+young friend, the Earl, promising to add "some graver labour," a
+promise fulfilled in Lucrece.  In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied,
+we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful Earl--the
+Earl of Essex, not of Southampton:  to Essex he did not dedicate his
+two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were his).  He "did nothing but
+ruminate" (he tells the world) on Essex.  How Mr. Greenwood's Unknown
+was occupied in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.
+
+I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much
+schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in
+London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by
+1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as "Shakescene."  There
+remains a difficulty.  By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of
+THIRTEEN plays, or even of six.  But I have not credited him with the
+authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely,
+Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus,
+Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, King John, the three plays of
+Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew.  Mr. Greenwood {112a} cites
+Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of
+1592 "some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written," and for
+Dr. Furnivall's opinion that eleven had been composed.
+
+If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we
+have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I
+should be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed,
+in these five years, by Will.  Mr. Greenwood writes, "Some of the
+dates are disputable"; and, for himself, would omit "Titus
+Andronicus, the three plays of Henry VI, and possibly also The Taming
+of the Shrew, while the reference to Hamlet also is, as I have
+elsewhere shown, of very doubtful force." {113a}  This leaves us with
+six of Dr. Furnivall's list of earliest plays put out of action.  The
+miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous enough to stagger my
+credulity remain.
+
+I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592-3
+was the ex-butcher's boy.  Meanwhile these five plays, written by
+somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr.
+Greenwood's book {113b} with Dr. Furnivall's eleven; and they fairly
+frighten him, if he be a "Stratfordian."  "Will, even Will," says the
+Stratfordian, "could not have composed the five, much less the
+eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed's thirteen 'before 1592.'" {113c}
+But, at the close of his work {113d} Mr. Greenwood reviews and
+disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean plays "before
+1592" as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian of whom Mr. Collins wrote
+in terms worthy of feu Mr. Bludyer of The Tomahawk.
+
+From the five plays left to Shakespeare's account in p. 51, King John
+(as we know it) is now eliminated.  "I find it impossible to believe
+that the same man was the author of the drama" (The Troublesome Reign
+of King John) "published in 1591, and that which, so far as we know,
+first saw the light in the Folio of 1623 . . .  Hardly a single line
+of the original version reappears in the King John of Shakespeare."
+{114a}  "I think it is a mistake to endeavour to fortify the argument
+against him" (my Will, toi que j'aime), "by ascribing to Shakespeare
+such old plays as the King John of 1591 or the primitive Hamlet."
+{114b}
+
+I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw King John apparently
+still "coloured on the card" among "Shakespeare's lot."  We are now
+left with Love's Labour's Lost, Midsummer Night's Dream, Comedy of
+Errors, and Romeo and Juliet, out of Dr. Furnivall's list of plays up
+to 1593.  The phantom force of miraculously early plays is "following
+darkness like a dream."  We do not know the date of A Midsummer
+Night's Dream, we do not know the date of Romeo and Juliet.  Mr.
+Gollancz dates the former "about 1592," and the latter "at 1591."
+{114c}  This is a mere personal speculation.  Of Love's Labour's
+Lost, we only know that our version is one "corrected and augmented"
+by William Shakespeare in 1598.  I dare say it is as early as 1591-2,
+in its older form.  Of The Comedy of Errors, Mr. Collins wrote, "It
+is all but certain that it was written between 1589 and 1592, and it
+is quite certain that it was written before the end of 1594." {114d}
+
+The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished.
+The miracle is very considerably abated.  In place of introducing the
+airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been,
+perhaps, more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate,
+Shakespeare's earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be
+placed about 1591-3.  There would then have been no specious
+appearance of miracles to be credited by Stratfordians to Will.  But
+even so, we have sufficient to "give us pause," says Mr. Greenwood,
+with justice.  It gives ME "pause," if I am to believe that, between
+1587 and 1592, Will wrote Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors,
+A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.  There is a limit
+even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we
+now possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the
+man.  But the dates, in fact, are unknown:  the miracle is
+apocryphal.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI:  THE COURTLY PLAYS:  "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST"
+
+
+
+We now come to consider another "miracle" discovered in the plays,--a
+miracle if the actor be the author.  The new portent is the
+courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make
+the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen
+and ladies in the plays.  To be sure the refinement in the jests is
+often conspicuously absent.  How could the rude actor learn his quips
+and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits?  This question I have
+tried to answer already,--the whole of these fashions abound in the
+literature of the day.
+
+Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the
+ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse,
+whether in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he
+himself frequented their society.  Marlowe did not frequent the best
+society; HE was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in
+the speeches of the great and noble in Edward II.  Courtiers and
+kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in
+blank verse.  The style is a poetical convention, while the quips and
+conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of the
+age of Lyly and his Euphues and his comedies, the age of the Arcadia.
+
+A cheap and probable source of Will's courtliness is to be found in
+the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately
+printed between 1584 and 1592.  Lyly's "real significance is that he
+was the first to bring together on the English stage the elements of
+high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare's Much Ado
+about Nothing and As You Like It" (and Love's Labour's Lost, one may
+add).  "Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly
+miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly's plays almost
+as closely as Lyly had read Pliny's Natural History. . . .  One could
+hardly imagine Love's Labour's Lost as existent in the period from
+1590 to 1600, had not Lyly's work just preceded it." {120a}
+
+"It is to Lyly's plays," writes Dr. Landmann, "that Shakespeare owes
+so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness of
+expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms,
+quibbles, and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as
+well as in his tragedies."  There follows a dissertation on the
+affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pleiade in France, and
+generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we
+reach Lyly, "in whose comedies," says Dr. Furness, "I think we should
+look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare." {121a}
+
+The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and
+court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in
+literature than at Court, decide that the poet of Love's Labour's
+Lost was not Will, but the courtly "concealed poet."  No doubt
+Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald {121b} that "Bacon wrote
+Marlowe," and, by parity of reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald
+does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly's comedies the
+grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth.
+"What for no?"  The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses,
+"Bacon wrote Marlowe," "Bacon wrote Shakespeare."
+
+The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore
+the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and
+are noted even in short educational histories of English literature.
+Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls,
+to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly's plays, and read the
+poems of the time.  I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet.
+It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to
+catch the manner of Lyly's Court comedies, and "Marlowe's mighty
+line" (Marlowe was not "brought up on the knees of Marchionesses"!),
+but to improve on them.  People did not commonly talk in the poetical
+way, heaven knows; people did not write in the poetic convention.
+Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule
+(we have abundance of their letters), like women of this world.
+There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters
+from Mary to Bothwell.  In this (we have a copy of the original
+French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured style already
+practised by Les Precieuses of her day; and expands into symbolisms
+in a fantastic jargon.  If courtiers of both sexes conversed in the
+style of Euphues (which is improbable), they learned the trick of it
+from Euphues; not the author of Euphues from them.  Lyly's most
+popular prose was accessible to Shakespeare.  The whole convention as
+to how the great should speak and bear themselves was accessible in
+poetry and the drama.  A man of genius naturally made his ladies and
+courtiers more witty, more "conceited," more eloquent, more gracious
+than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.
+
+It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts
+so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon,
+intimately familiar with the society of the great, could make the
+great speak as, in the plays, they do--and as in real life they
+probably did NOT!
+
+We now look at Love's Labour's Lost, published in quarto, in 1598, as
+"corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere."  The date of composition
+is unknown, but the many varieties of versification, with some
+allusions, mark it as among the earliest of the dramas.  Supposing
+that Shakespeare obtained his knowledge of fine manners and speech,
+and of the tedious quips and conceits which he satirises, from the
+contemporary poems, plays, and novels which abounded in them, and
+from precieux and precieuses who imitated them, as I suggest, even
+then Love's Labour's Lost is an extremely eccentric piece.  I cannot
+imagine how a man who knew the foreign politics of his age as Bacon
+did, could have dreamed of writing anything so eccentric, that is, if
+it has any connection with foreign politics of the time.
+
+The scene is the Court of Ferdinand, King of Navarre.  In 1589-93,
+the eyes of England were fixed on the Court of her ally, Henri of
+Navarre, in his struggle with the League and the Guises; the War of
+Religion.  But the poet calls the King "Ferdinand," taking perhaps
+from some story this non-existent son of Charles III of Navarre (died
+1425):  to whom, according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian chronicler
+of that time, the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold.  This is a
+transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the presence
+of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre in the
+play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and has the air of being
+borrowed from some lost story or brief novel.  Bacon's brother,
+Anthony, was English minister at the Court of Navarre.  What could
+tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre,
+plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d'Arc, and make him, at that
+period, found an Academe for three years of austere study and absence
+of women?  But, if Bacon did this, what could induce him to give to
+the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Marechal de Biron with
+de Longueville (both of them, in 1589-93, the chief adherents of
+Henri of Navarre), and add to them "Dumain," that is, the Duc de
+Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and of the
+Huguenots?  Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare, the freak
+is of the most eccentric,--but in Bacon this friskiness is indeed
+strange.  I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, {124a} find any "allusions to
+the Civil War of France."  France and Navarre, in the play, are in
+full peace.
+
+The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about
+1430.  By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne, and
+Bankes's celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the date to
+1591.  But the Navarre of the play is a region "out of space, out of
+time," a fairy world of projected Academes (like that of the four
+young men in de la Primaudaye's L'Academie Francaise, Englished in
+1586) and of peace, while the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was
+engaged in a struggle for life and faith; and in his ceaseless
+amours.
+
+Many of Shakespeare's anachronisms are easily intelligible.  He takes
+a novel or story about any remote period, or he chooses, as for the
+Midsummer Night's Dream, a period earlier than that of the Trojan
+war.  He gives to the Athens contemporary with the "Late Minoan III"
+period (1600 B.C.?) a Duke, and his personages live like English
+nobles and rustics of his own day, among the fairies of English folk-
+lore.  It is the manner of Chaucer and of the poets and painters of
+any age before the end of the eighteenth century.  The resulting
+anachronisms are natural and intelligible.  We do not expect war-
+chariots in Troilus and Cressida; it is when the author makes the
+bronze-clad Achaeans familiar with Plato and Aristotle that we are
+surprised.  In Love's Labour's Lost we do not expect the author to
+introduce the manners of the early fifteenth century, the date of the
+affair of the 200,000 ducats.  Let the play reflect the men and
+manners of 1589-93,--but why place Mayenne, a fanatical Catholic foe
+of Navarre, among the courtiers of the Huguenot King of Navarre?
+
+As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day Dumain)
+appearing as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri, Bacon, of all
+men, could not have made that absurd error.  It was Shakespeare who
+took but an absent-minded interest in foreign politics.  If Bacon is
+building his play on an affair, the ducats, of 1425-35 (roughly
+speaking), he should not bring in a performing horse, trained by
+Bankes, a Staffordshire man, which was performing its tricks at
+Shrewsbury--in 1591. {126a}  Thus early we find that great scholar
+mixing up chronology in a way which, in Shakespeare even, surprises;
+but, in Bacon, seems quite out of keeping.
+
+Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as "Dumain,"--
+Mayenne, "whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts
+of French affairs in connection with Navarre's movements that
+Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters."  Bacon
+would not have been so led!  As Mayenne and Henri fought against each
+other at Ivry, in 1590, this was carrying nonsense far, even for
+Will, but for the earnestly instructive Bacon!
+
+"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 Ambassador to
+France," I cannot conjecture.  THERE ARE NO FRENCH POLITICS IN THE
+PIECE, any more than there are "mysteries of fashionable life," such
+as Bacon might have heard of from Essex 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 passage 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
+illustrious 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 fashionable 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 embassy 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 embassy 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 fashionable 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 Ambassador 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 sex!
+
+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 assurance:  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 manuscript 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
+assumed 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 authorship.  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 Warwickshire 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
+identity 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 identity 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
+authorship 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.
+
+Destitute 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 Passionate 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 Passionate
+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 authorship 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 Warwickshire man
+cannot be the author."
+
+"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 circumstances:
+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 bumbast 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 ingratitude, 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 assailed 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
+circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; "yes, for they now
+have" an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their
+own fellowship.  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 bumbast 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
+circumstances 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 assuming the validity of the surmise that there is an allusion
+to Shakspere, {143a} "the utmost that we should be entitled 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 entitled to say," is, in my opinion,
+what we have no shadow of a title 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 bumbast 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
+entitled 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.  Nobody 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 Parnassus (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"
+the University wits "and Ben Jonson too."  The date is not earlier
+than that of Ben's satiric play on the poets, The Poetaster (1601),
+to which reference is made.  Since Kempe is to be represented as
+wholly ignorant, his opinion of Shakespeare's pre-eminent merit only
+proves, as in the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried
+the excellences of Shakespeare.  In him they saw no scholar.
+
+The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor and
+author.
+
+All this "is quite consistent with the theory that Shake-speare was a
+pseudonym," {147a} says Mr. Greenwood.  Of course it is, but it is
+NOT consistent with the theory that Shakespeare was an uneducated,
+bookless rustic, for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in
+a day, in an hour.  Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if
+you will, that HE thought that KEMPE thought, that his fellow player
+was the author.  But we have better evidence of what the actors
+thought than in the Cambridge play.
+
+In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia credits
+Shakespeare with Venus and Adonis, with privately circulated sonnets,
+and with a number of the comedies and tragedies.  How the allusions
+"negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume is not
+apparent," says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method.  I
+repeat that he wanders from the point, which is, here, that the only
+William Shak(&c.) known to us at the time, in London, was credited
+with the plays and poems on all sides, which proves that no
+incompatibility between the man and the works was recognised.
+
+Then Weaver (1599) alludes to him as author of Venus, Lucrece, Romeo,
+Richard, "more whose names I know not."  Davies (1610) calls him "our
+English Terence" (the famous comedian), and mentions him as having
+"played some Kingly parts in sport."  Freeman (1614) credits him with
+Venus and Lucrece.  "Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander."  I
+repeat Heywood's evidence.  Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable
+domestic play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, was, from the old days
+of Henslowe, in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and an actor; he
+survived into the reign of Charles I.  Writing on the familiar names
+of the poets, "Jack Fletcher," "Frank Beaumont," "Kit Marlowe," "Tom
+Nash," he says,
+
+
+"Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill
+Commanded mirth and passion, was but 'Will.'"
+
+
+Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author?  No quibbles
+serve against the evidence.
+
+We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare's death, or
+invoke, at present, Ben Jonson's panegyric of 1623.  As to Davies,
+his dull and obscure epigram is addressed "To our English Terence,
+Mr. Will Shake-speare."  He accosts Shakespeare as "Good Will."  He
+remarks that, "as some say," if Will "had not played some Kingly
+parts in sport," he had been "a companion for a KING," and "been a
+King among the meaner sort."  Nobody, now, can see the allusion and
+the joke.  Shakespeare's company, in 1604, acted a play on the Gowrie
+Conspiracy of 1600.  King James suppressed the play after the second
+night, as, of course, he was brought on the stage throughout the
+action:  and in very droll and dreadful situations.  Did Will take
+the King's part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, "as some say"?  Nobody
+knows.  But Mr. Greenwood, to disable Davies's recognition of Mr.
+Will as a playwright, "Our English Terence," quotes, from Florio's
+Montaigne, a silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence's
+plays were written by Scipio and Laelius.  In fact, Terence alludes
+in his prologue to the Adelphi, to a spiteful report that he was
+aided by great persons.  The prologue may be the source of the fable-
+-that does not matter.  Davies might get the fable in Montaigne, and,
+knowing that some Great One wrote Will's plays, might therefore, in
+irony, address him as "Our English Terence."  This is a pretty free
+conjecture!  In Roman comedy he had only two names known to him to
+choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus.  But if Davies was in the
+great Secret, a world of others must have shared le Secret de
+Polichinelle.  Yet none hints at it, and only a very weak cause could
+catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that Davies KNEW, and used
+"Terence" as a gibe. {149a}
+
+The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor
+wrote the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so,
+and therefore that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to
+demonstrate that he was incapable of the poetry and the knowledge
+displayed in his works.  Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a
+Baconian critic goes too far when he makes Will incapable of writing.
+Such a Will could deceive no mortal. {150a}  But does Mr. Greenwood,
+who finds in the Author of the plays "much learning, and remarkable
+classical attainments," or "a wide familiarity with the classics,"
+{150b} suppose that his absolutely bookless Will could have persuaded
+his intimates that he was the author of plays exhibiting "a wide
+familiarity with the classics," or "remarkable classical
+attainments."  The thing is wholly impossible.
+
+I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to Shakespeare
+speaks of him as "learned," erudite, scholarly, and so forth.  The
+epithets for him are "sweet," "gentle," "honeyed," "sugared," "honey-
+tongued"--this is the convention.  The tradition followed by Milton,
+who was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote
+L'Allegro just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare "sweetest
+Shakespeare, Fancy's child," with "native wood-notes wild"; and gives
+to Jonson "the LEARNED sock."  Fuller, like Milton, was born eight
+years before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608.  Like Milton
+he was a Cambridge man.  The First Folio of Shakespeare's works
+appeared when each of these two bookish men was aged fifteen.  It
+would necessarily revive interest in Shakespeare, now first known as
+far as about half of his plays went:  he would be discussed among
+lovers of literature at Cambridge.  Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller's
+remark that Shakespeare's "learning was very little," that, if alive,
+he would confess himself "to be never any scholar." {151a}  I cannot
+grant that Fuller is dividing the persons of actor and author.  Men
+of Shakespeare's generation, such as Jonson, did not think him
+learned; nor did men of the next generation.  If Mr. Collins's view
+be correct, the men of Shakespeare's and of Milton's generations were
+too ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was deeply learned in the
+literature of Rome, and in the literature of Greece.  Every one was
+too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII:  "THE SILENCE OF PHILIP HENSLOWE"
+
+
+
+When Shakespeare is mentioned as an author by contemporary writers,
+the Baconian stratagem, we have seen, is to cry, "Ah, but you cannot
+prove the author mentioned to be the actor."  We have seen that Meres
+(1598) speaks of Shakespeare as the leading tragic and comic poet
+("Poor poet-ape that would be thought our chief," quoth Jonson), as
+author of Venus and Adonis, and as a sonneteer.  "All this does
+nothing whatever to support the idea that the Stratford player was
+the author of the plays and poems alluded to," says Mr. Greenwood,
+playing that card again. {155a}
+
+The allusions, I repeat, DO prove that Shak(&c.), the actor, was
+believed to be the author, till any other noted William Shak(&c.) is
+found to have been conspicuously before the town.  "There is nothing
+at all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal
+knowledge of Shakespeare."  There is nothing at all to prove that
+Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge of nine-
+tenths of the English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he mentions.
+"On the question--who was Shakespeare?--he throws no light."  He
+"throws no light on the question" "who was?" any of the poets
+mentioned by him, except one, quite forgotten, whose College he names
+. . . To myself this "sad repeated air,"--"critics who praise
+Shakespeare do not say WHO SHAKESPEARE was,"--would appear to be, not
+an argument, but a subterfuge:  though Mr. Greenwood honestly
+believes it to be an argument,--otherwise he would not use it:  much
+less would he repeat it with frequent iteration.  The more a man was
+notorious, as was Will Shakspere the actor, the less the need for any
+critic to tell his public "who Shakespeare was."
+
+As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when Shakespeare is
+alluded to as an author, so he tries to better his case when, in the
+account-book of Philip Henslowe, an owner of theatres, money-lender,
+pawn-broker, purchaser of plays from authors, and so forth,
+Shakespeare is NOT mentioned at all.  Here is a mystery which,
+properly handled, may advance the great cause.  Henslowe has notes of
+loans of money to several actors, some of them of Shakespeare's
+company, "The Lord Chamberlain's."  There is no such note of a loan
+to Shakespeare.  Does this prove that he was not an actor?  If so,
+Burbage was not an actor; Henslowe never names him.
+
+There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after each
+performance of any play in one of his theatres.  In these notes THE
+NAME OF SHAKESPEARE IS NEVER ONCE MENTIONED AS THE AUTHOR OF ANY
+PLAY.  How weird!  But in THESE notes the names of the authors of the
+plays acted are never mentioned.  Does this suggest that Bacon wrote
+all these plays?
+
+On the other hand, there are frequent mentions of advances of money
+to authors who were working at plays for Henslowe, singly, or in
+pairs, threes, fours, or fives.  We find Drayton, Dekker, Chapman,
+and nine authors now forgotten by all but antiquarians.  We have also
+Ben Jonson (1597), Marston, Munday, Middleton, Webster, and others,
+authors in Henslowe's pay.  BUT THE SAME OF SHAKESPEARE NEVER
+APPEARS.  Mysterious!  The other men's names, writes Dr. Furness,
+occur "because they were all writers for Henslowe's theatre, but we
+must wait at all events for the discovery of some other similar
+record, before we can produce corresponding memoranda regarding
+Shaksper" (sic) "and his productions." {157a}
+
+The natural mind of the ordinary man explains all by saying,
+"Henslowe records no loans of money to Shakspere the actor, because
+he lent him no money.  He records no payments for plays to
+Shakespeare the author-actor, because to Henslowe the actor sold no
+plays."  That is the whole explanation of the Silence of Philip
+Henslowe.  If Shakspere did sell a play to Henslowe, why should that
+financier omit the fact from his accounts?  Suppose that the actor
+was illiterate as Baconians fervently believe, and sold Bacon's
+plays, what prevented him from selling a play of Bacon's (under his
+own name, as usual) to Henslowe?  To obtain a Baconian reply you must
+wander into conjecture, and imagine that Bacon forbade the
+transaction.  Then WHY did he forbid it?  Because he could get a
+better price from Shakspere's company?  The same cause would produce
+the same effect on Shakspere himself; whether he were the author, or
+were Bacon's, or any man's go-between.  On any score but that of
+money, why was Henslowe good enough for Ben Jonson, Dekker, Heywood,
+Middleton, and Webster, and not good enough for Bacon, who did not
+appear in the matter at all, but was represented in it by the actor,
+Will?  As a gentleman and a man of the Court, Bacon would be as much
+discredited if he were known to sell (for 6 pounds on an average) his
+noble works to the Lord Chamberlain's Company, as if he sold them to
+Henslowe.
+
+I know not whether the great lawyer, courtier, scholar, and
+philosopher is supposed by Baconians to have given Will Shakspere a
+commission on his sales of plays; or to have let him keep the whole
+sum in each case.  I know not whether the players paid Shakspere a
+sum down for his (or Bacon's) plays, or whether Will received a
+double share, or other, or any share of the profits on them, as
+Henslowe did when he let a house to the players.  Nobody knows any of
+these things.
+
+"If Shakspere the player had been a dramatist, surely Henslowe would
+have employed him also, like the others, in that behalf." {159a}
+Henslowe would, if he could have got the "copy" cheap enough.  Was
+any one of "the others," the playwrights, a player, holding a share
+in his company?  If not, the fact makes an essential difference, for
+Shakspere WAS a shareholder.  Collier, in his preface to Henslowe's
+so-called "Diary," mentions a playwright who was bound to scribble
+for Henslowe only (Henry Porter), and another, Chettle, who was bound
+to write only for the company protected by the Earl of Nottingham.
+{159b}  Modern publishers and managers sometimes make the same terms
+with novelists and playwrights.
+
+It appears to me that Shakspere's company would be likely, as his
+plays were very popular, to make the same sort of agreement with him,
+and to give him such terms as he would be glad to accept,--whether
+the wares were his own--or Bacon's.  He was a keen man of business.
+In such a case, he would not write for Henslowe's pittance.  He had a
+better market.  The plays, whether written by himself, or Bacon, or
+the Man in the Moon, were at his disposal, and he did not dispose of
+them to Henslowe, wherefore Henslowe cannot mention him in his
+accounts.  That is all.
+
+Quoting an American Judge (Dr. Stotsenburg, apparently), Mr.
+Greenwood cites the circumstance that, in two volumes of Alleyn's
+papers "there is not one mention of such a poet as William Shaksper
+in his list of actors, poets, and theatrical comrades." {160a}  If
+this means that Shakspere is not mentioned by Alleyn among actors,
+are we to infer that William was not an actor?  Even Baconians insist
+that he was an actor.  "How strange, how more than strange," cries
+Mr. Greenwood, "that Henslowe should make no mention in all this long
+diary, embracing all the time from 1591 to 1609, of the actor-author
+. . . No matter.  Credo quia impossibile!" {160b}  Credo what? and
+what is IMPOSSIBLE?  Henslowe's volume is no Diary; he does not tell
+a single anecdote of any description; he merely enters loans, gains,
+payments.  Does Henslowe mention, say, Ben Jonson, WHEN HE IS NOT
+DOING BUSINESS WITH BEN?  Does he mention any actor or author except
+in connection with money matters?  Then, if he did no business with
+Shakspere the actor, in borrowing or lending, and did no business
+with Shakespeare the author, in borrowing, lending, buying or
+selling, "How strange, how more than strange" it would be if Henslowe
+DID mention Shakespeare!  He was not keeping a journal of literary
+and dramatic jottings.  He was keeping an account of his expenses and
+receipts.  He never names Richard Burbage any more than he mentions
+Shakespeare.
+
+Mr. Greenwood again expresses his views about this dark suspicious
+mystery, the absence of Shakespeare or Shakspere (or Shak, as you
+like it), from Henslowe's accounts, if Shak(&c.) wrote plays.  But
+the mystery, if mystery there be, is just as obscure if the actor
+were the channel through which Bacon's plays reached the stage, for
+the pretended author of these masterpieces.  Shak--was not the man to
+do all the troking, bargaining, lying, going here and there, and
+making himself a motley to the view for 0 pounds, 0s, 0d.  If he were
+a sham, a figure-head, a liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts,
+HE WOULD BE PAID FOR IT.  But he did not deal with Henslowe in his
+bargainings, and THAT is why Henslowe does not mention him.  Mr.
+Greenwood, in one place, {161a} agrees, so far, with me.  "Why did
+Henslowe not mention Shakespeare as the writer of other plays" (than
+Titus Andronicus and Henry VI)?  "I think the answer is simple
+enough."  (So do I.)  "Neither Shakspere nor 'Shakespeare' ever wrote
+for Henslowe!"  The obvious is perceived at last; and the reason
+given is "that he was above Henslowe's 'skyline,'" "he" being the
+Author.  We only differ as to WHY the author was above Henslowe's
+"sky-line."  I say, because good Will had a better market, that of
+his Company.  I understand Mr. Greenwood to think,--because the Great
+Unknown was too great a man to deal with Henslowe.  If to write for
+the stage were discreditable, to deal (unknown) with Henslowe was no
+more disgraceful than to deal with "a cry of players"; and as
+(unknown) Will did the bargaining, the Great Unknown was as safe with
+Will in one case as in the other.  If Will did not receive anything
+for the plays from his own company (who firmly believed in his
+authorship), they must have said, "Will! dost thou serve the Muses
+and thy obliged fellows for naught?  Dost thou give us two popular
+plays yearly,--gratis?"
+
+Do you not see that, in the interests of the Great Secret itself,
+Will HAD to take the pay for the plays (pretended his) from somebody.
+Will Shakspere making his dear fellows and friends a present of two
+masterpieces yearly was too incredible.  So I suppose he did have
+royalties on the receipts, or otherwise got his money; and, as he
+certainly did not get them from Henslowe, Henslowe had no conceivable
+reason for entering Will's name in his accounts.
+
+Such are the reflections of a plain man, but to an imaginative soul
+there seems to be a brooding mist, with a heart of fire, which half
+conceals and half reveals the darkened chamber wherein abides "The
+Silence of Philip Henslowe."  "The Silence of Philip Henslowe," Mr.
+Greenwood writes, "is a very remarkable phenomenon . . . "  It is a
+phenomenon precisely as remarkable as the absence of Mr. Greenwood's
+name from the accounts of a boot-maker with whom he has never had any
+dealings.
+
+"If, however, there was a man in high position, 'a concealed poet,'"
+who "took the works of others and rewrote and transformed them,
+besides bringing out original plays of his own . . . then it is
+natural enough that his name should not appear among those [of the]
+for the most part impecunious dramatists to whom Henslowe paid money
+for playwriting." {163a}  Nothing can be more natural, and, in fact,
+the name of Bacon, or Southampton, or James VI, or Sir John Ramsay,
+or Sir Walter Raleigh, or Sir Fulke Greville, or any other "man in
+high position," does NOT appear in Henslowe's accounts.  Nor does the
+name of William Shak(&c.).  But why should it not appear if Will sold
+either his own plays, or those of the noble friend to whom he lent
+his name and personality--to Henslowe?  Why not?
+
+Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great
+"concealed poet" "of high position," who can "bring out original
+plays of his own," and yet "takes the works of others," say of
+"sporting Kyd," or of Dekker and Chettle, and such poor devils,--
+TAKES them as a Yankee pirate-publisher takes my rhymes,--and
+"rewrites and transforms them."
+
+Bacon (or Bungay) CANNOT "take" them without permission of their
+legal owners,--Shakspere's or any other company;--of any one, in
+short, who, as Ben Jonson says, "buys up reversions of old plays."
+How is he to manage these shabby dealings?  Apparently he employs
+Will Shakspere, spells his own "nom de plume" "Shakespeare," and has
+his rewritings and transformations of the destitute author's work
+acted by Will's company.  What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke
+Greville, or James VI, or any "man in high position" whom fancy can
+suggest!  The plays by the original authors, whoever they were, could
+only be obtained by the "concealed poet" and "man in high position"
+from the legal owners, Shakspere's company, usually.  The concealed
+poet had to negotiate with the owners, and Bacon (or whoever he was)
+employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first, I think, to extract the
+plays from the owners, and then to pretend that he himself, even
+Will, had "rewritten and transformed them."
+
+What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it
+was that Will would blackmail the "man in high position"!
+"Doubtless" he did:  we find Bacon arrested for debt, more than once,
+while Will buys New Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted from
+the concealed poet of high position. {164a}  Bacon did associate with
+that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham, who forged a
+postscript to Mary Stuart's letter to Babington.  But now, if not
+Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high position, with a
+mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays by sad, needy
+authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire
+poacher and ignorant butcher's boy, country schoolmaster, draper's
+apprentice, enfin, tout le tremblement.
+
+"How strange, how more than strange!"
+
+The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March
+3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the
+performances of many plays.  He was paid as owner or lessee of the
+House used by this or that company.  On March 3, 1591, the play acted
+by "Lord Strange's (Derby's) men" was Henry VI.  Several other plays
+with names familiar in Shakespeare's Works, such as Titus Andronicus,
+all the three parts of Henry VI, King Leare (April 6, 1593), Henry V
+(May 14, 1592), The Taming of a Shrew (June 11, 1594), and Hamlet,
+paid toll to Henslowe.  He "received" so much, on each occasion, when
+they were acted in a theatre of his.  But he never records his
+purchase of these plays; and it is not generally believed that
+Shakespeare was the author of all these plays, in the form which they
+bore in 1591-4:  though there is much difference of opinion.
+
+There is one rather interesting case.  On August 25, 1594, Henslowe
+enters "ne" (that is, "a new play") "Received at the Venesyon
+Comodey, eighteen pence."  That was his share of the receipts.  The
+Lord Chamberlain's Company, that of Shakespeare, was playing in
+Henslowe's theatre at Newington Butts.  If the "Venesyon Comodey"
+(Venetian Comedy) were The Merchant of Venice, this is the first
+mention of it.  But nobody knows what Henslowe meant by "the Venesyon
+Comodey."  He does not mention the author's name, because, in this
+part of his accounts he never does mention the author or authors.  He
+only names them when he buys from, or lends to, or has other money
+dealings with the authors.  He had none with Shakespeare, hence the
+Silence of Philip Henslowe.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX:  THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE--HIS MONUMENT AND
+PORTRAITS
+
+
+
+In the chapter on the Preoccupations of Bacon the reader may find
+help in making up his mind as to whether Bacon, with his many and
+onerous duties and occupations, his scientific studies, and his
+absorbing scientific preoccupation, is a probable author of the
+Shakespearean plays.  Mr. Greenwood finds the young Shakspere
+impossible--because of his ignorance--which made him such a really
+good pseudo-author, and such a successful mask for Bacon, or Bacon's
+unknown equivalent.  The Shakspere of later life, the well-to-do
+Shakspere, the purchaser of the right to bear arms; so bad at paying
+one debt at least; so eager a creditor; a would-be encloser of a
+common; a man totally bookless, is, to Mr. Greenwood's mind, an
+impossible author of the later plays.
+
+Here, first, are moral objections on the ground of character as
+revealed in some legal documents concerning business.  Now, I am very
+ready to confess that William's dealings with his debtors, and with
+one creditor, are wholly unlike what I should expect from the author
+of the plays.  Moreover, the conduct of Shelley in regard to his wife
+was, in my opinion, very mean and cruel, and the last thing that we
+could have expected from one who, in verse, was such a tender
+philanthropist, and in life was--women apart--the best-hearted of
+men.  The conduct of Robert Burns, alas, too often disappoints the
+lover of his Cottar's Saturday Night and other moral pieces.  He was
+an inconsistent walker.
+
+I sincerely wish that Shakespeare had been less hard in money
+matters, just as I wish that in financial matters Scott had been more
+like himself, that he had not done the last things that we should
+have expected him to do.  As a member of the Scottish Bar it was
+inconsistent with his honour to be the secret proprietor of a
+publishing and a printing business.  This is the unexplained moral
+paradox in the career of a man of chivalrous honour and strict
+probity:  but the fault did not prevent Scott from writing his novels
+and poems.  Why, then, should the few bare records of Shakspere's
+monetary transactions make HIS authorship impossible?  The objection
+seems weakly sentimental.
+
+Macaulay scolds Scott as fiercely as Mr. Greenwood scolds Shakspere,-
+-for the more part, ignorantly and unjustly.  Still, there is matter
+to cause surprise and regret.  Both Scott and Shakspere are accused
+of writing for gain, and of spending money on lands and houses with
+the desire to found families.  But in the mysterious mixture of each
+human personality, any sober soul who reflects on his own sins and
+failings will not think other men's failings incompatible with
+intellectual excellence.  Bacon's own conduct in money matters was
+that of a man equally grasping and extravagant.  Ben Jonson thus
+describes Shakespeare as a social character:  "He was indeed honest,
+and of an open and free nature . . . I loved the man and do honour
+his memory on this side idolatry as much as any."  Perhaps Ben never
+owed money to Shakspere and refused to pay!
+
+We must not judge a man's whole intellectual character, and declare
+him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers
+about matters of business.  Apparently Shakspere helped that
+Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of
+despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,--
+pursued by the distraint of one of the friendly family of Quiney--
+Adrian Quiney.  They were neighbours and made a common dunghill in
+Henley Street. {171a}  I do not, like Mr. Greenwood, see anything "at
+all out of the way" in the circumstance "that a man should be writing
+Hamlet, and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on
+loan at some unspecified interest." {171b}  Nor do I see anything at
+all out of the way in Bacon's prosecution of his friend and
+benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing Hamlet.  Indeed,
+Shakspere's case is the less "out of the way" of the two.  He wanted
+his loan to be repaid, and told his lawyer to bring an action.  Bacon
+wanted to keep his head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or
+to keep his body out of the Tower; or he merely, as he declares,
+wanted to do his duty as a lawyer of the Crown.  In any case, Bacon
+was in a tragic position almost unexampled; and was at once
+overwhelmed by work, and, one must suppose, by acute distress of
+mind, in the case of Essex.  He must have felt this the more keenly,
+if, as some Baconians vow, HE WROTE THE SONNETS TO ESSEX.  Whether he
+were writing his Hamlet when engaged in Essex's case (1601), or any
+other of his dramatic masterpieces, even this astonishing man must
+have been sorely bestead to combine so many branches of business.
+
+Thus I would reply to Mr. Greenwood's amazement that Shakspere, a
+hard creditor, and so forth, should none the less have been able to
+write his plays.  But if it is meant that a few business transactions
+must have absorbed the whole consciousness of Shakespeare, and left
+him neither time nor inclination for poetry, consider the scientific
+preoccupation of Bacon, his parliamentary duties, his ceaseless
+activity as "one of the legal body-guard of the Queen" at a time when
+he had often to be examining persons accused of conspiracy,--and do
+not forget his long and poignant anxiety about Essex, his constant
+efforts to reconcile him with Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause
+without losing her favour; and, finally, the anguish of prosecuting
+his friend, and of knowing how hardly the world judged his own
+conduct.  Follow him into his relations with James I; his eager
+pursuit of favour, the multiplicity of his affairs, his pecuniary
+distresses, and the profound study and severe labour entailed by the
+preparation for and the composition of The Advancement of Learning
+(1603-5).  He must be a stout-hearted Baconian who can believe that,
+between 1599 and 1605, Bacon was writing Hamlet, and other
+masterpieces of tragedy or comedy.  But all is possible to genius.
+What Mr. Greenwood's Great Unknown was doing at this period, "neither
+does he know, nor do I know, but he only."  He, no doubt, had
+abundance of leisure.
+
+At last Shakspere died (1616), and had not the mead of one melodious
+tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the shape of
+obituary verses.  This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement.  "Was it
+because 'the friends of the Muses' were for the most part aware that
+Shakespeare had not died with Shakspere?"  Did Jonson perchance think
+that his idea might be realised when he wrote,
+
+
+   "What a sight it were,
+To see thee in our waters yet appear"?
+
+
+and so on.  Did Jonson expect and hope to see the genuine
+"Shakespeare" return to the stage, seven years after the death of
+Shakspere the actor, the Swan of Avon?  As Jonson was fairly sane, we
+can no more suspect him of having hoped for this miracle than believe
+that most of the poets knew the actor not to be the author.  Moreover
+Jonson, while desiring that Shakespeare might "shine forth" again and
+cheer the drooping stage, added,
+
+
+"Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like Night,
+And despairs day, but for thy volume's light,"
+
+
+that is--the Folio of 1623.  Ben did not weave the amazing tissue of
+involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians.
+Beaumont died in the same year as Shakspere, who died in the depths
+of the country, weary of London.  Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary
+poems dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont?  Did Fletcher, did
+Jonson, produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend; in
+Fletcher's case his constant partner?  No?  Were the poets, then,
+aware that Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems and plays were written
+by Bacon? {174a}
+
+I am not to discuss Shakespeare's Will, the "second-best bed," and so
+forth.  But as Shakespeare's Will says not a word about his books, it
+is decided by Mr. Greenwood that he had no books.  Mr. Greenwood is a
+lawyer; so was my late friend Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White
+Staunton, who remarks that Shakespeare bequeathed "all the rest of my
+goods, chattels, leases, &c., to my son-in-law, John Hall, gent."
+(He really WAS a "gent." with authentic coat-armour.)
+
+It is with Mr. Elton's opinion, not with my ignorance, that Mr.
+Greenwood must argue in proof of the view that "goods" are
+necessarily exclusive of books, for Mr. Elton takes it as a quite
+natural fact that Shakespeare's books passed, with his other goods,
+to Mr. Hall, and thence to a Mr. Nash, to whom Mr. Hall left "my
+study of books" {175a} (library).  I only give this as a lawyer's
+opinion.
+
+There is in the Bodleian an Aldine Ovid, "with Shakespeare's"
+signature (merely Wm. She.), and a note, "This little volume of Ovid
+was given to me by W. Hall, who sayd it was once Will Shakespeare's."
+I do not know that the signature (like that on Florio's Montaigne, in
+the British Museum) has been detected as a forgery; nor do I know
+that Shakespeare's not specially mentioning his books proves that he
+had none.  Lawyers appear to differ as to this inference:  both Mr.
+Elton and Mr. Greenwood seem equally confident. {175b}  But if it
+were perfectly natural that the actor, Shakspere, should have no
+books, then he certainly made no effort, by the local colour of
+owning a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he WAS the author.
+Yet they believed that he was--really there is no wriggling out of
+it.  As regards any of his own MSS. which Shakespeare may have had
+(one would expect them to be at his theatre), and their monetary
+value, if they were not, as usual, the property of his company, and
+of him as a member thereof, we can discuss that question in the
+section headed "The First Folio."
+
+It appears that Shakespeare's daughter, Judith, could write no more
+than her grandfather. {176a}  Nor, I repeat, could the Lady Jane
+Gordon, daughter of the great Earl of Huntly, when she was married to
+the Earl of Bothwell in 1566.  At all events, Lady Jane "made her
+mark."  It may be feared that Judith, brought up in that very
+illiterate town of Stratford, under an illiterate mother, was
+neglected in her education.  Sad, but very common in women of her
+rank, and scarcely a proof that her father did not write the plays.
+
+As "nothing is known of the disposition and character" {176b} of
+Shakespeare's grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, who died in 1670, it is
+not so paralysingly strange that nothing is known of any relics or
+anecdotes of Shakespeare which she may have possessed.  Mr. Greenwood
+"would have supposed that she would have had much to say about the
+great poet," exhibited his books (if any), and so forth.  Perhaps she
+did,--but how, if we "know nothing about her disposition and
+character," can we tell?  No interviewers rushed to her house
+(Abington Hall, Northampton-shire) with pencils and notebooks to
+record her utterances; no reporter interviewed her for the press.  It
+is surprising, is it not?
+
+The inference might be drawn, in the Baconian manner, that, during
+the Commonwealth and Restoration, "the friends of the Muses" knew
+that the actor was NOT the author, and therefore did not interview
+his granddaughter in the country.
+
+"But, at any rate, we have the Stratford monument," says Mr.
+Greenwood, and delves into this problem.  Even the Stratford monument
+of Shakespeare in the parish church is haunted by Baconian mysteries.
+If the gentle reader will throw his eye over the photograph {177a} of
+the monument as it now exists, he may not be able to say to the face
+of the poet -
+
+
+"Thou wast that all to me, Will,
+For which my soul did pine."
+
+
+But if he has any knowledge of Jacobean busts on monuments, he will
+probably agree with me in saying, "This effigy, though executed by
+somebody who was not a Pheidias, and who perhaps worked merely from
+descriptions, is, at all events, Jacobean."  The same may assuredly
+be said of the monument; it is in good Jacobean style:  the pillars
+with their capitals are graceful:  all the rest is in keeping; and
+the two inscriptions are in the square capital letters of
+inscriptions of the period; not in italic characters.  Distrusting my
+own EXPERTISE, I have consulted Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Holmes of
+the National Portrait Gallery.  They, with Mr. Spielmann, think the
+work to be of the early seventeenth century.
+
+Next, glance at the figure opposite.  This is a reproduction of "the
+earliest representation of the Bust" (and monument) in Dugdale's
+Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656).  Compare the two objects, point
+by point, from the potato on top with holes in it, of Dugdale, which
+is meant for a skull, through all the details,--bust and all.  Does
+Dugdale's print, whether engraved by Hollar or not, represent a
+Jacobean work?  Look at the two ludicrous children, their legs
+dangling in air; at the lions' heads above the capitals of the
+pillars; at the lettering of the two visible words of the
+inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping a
+cushion to his abdomen.  That hideous design was not executed by an
+artist who "had his eye on the object," if the object were a Jacobean
+monument:  while the actual monument was fashioned in no period of
+art but the Jacobean.  From Digges' rhymes in the Folio of 1623, we
+know that Shakespeare already had his "Stratford monument."  THE
+EXISTING OBJECT IS WHAT HE HAD; the monument in Dugdale is what, I
+hope, no architect of 1616-23 could have imagined or designed.
+
+Dugdale's engraving is not a correct copy of any genuine Jacobean
+work of art.  Is Dugdale accurate in his reproductions of other
+monuments in Stratford Church?  To satisfy himself on this point, Sir
+George Trevelyan, as he wrote to me (June 13, 1912), "made a sketch
+of the Carew Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and found that
+the discrepancies between the original tomb and the representation in
+Dugdale's Warwickshire are far and away greater than in the monument
+to William Shakespeare."
+
+Mr. Greenwood, {179a} while justly observing that "the little sitting
+figures . . . are placed as no monumental sculptor would place them,"
+"on the whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the
+substantial accuracy of Dugdale's figure . . .  It is impossible to
+suppose that Hollar would have drawn and that Dugdale would have
+published a mere travesty of the Stratford Monument."
+
+I do not know who drew the design, but a travesty of Jacobean work it
+is in every detail of the monument.  A travesty is what Dugdale gives
+as a representation of the Carew monument.  Mr. Greenwood, elsewhere,
+repeating his criticism of the impossible figures of children, says:
+"This is certainly mere matter of detail, and, in the absence of
+other evidence, would give us no warrant for doubting the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale's presentment of the 'Shakespeare' bust." {180a}
+
+Why are we to believe that Dugdale's artist was merely fantastic in
+his design of the children (and also remote from Jacobean taste in
+every detail), and yet to credit him with "substantial accuracy" in
+his half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cushion to his
+stomach?  With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we
+to accept him as accurate in his representation of the bust?
+Moreover, other evidence is not wanting.  It is positively certain
+that the monument existing in 1748, was then known as "the original
+monument," and that no other monument was put in its place, at that
+date or later.
+
+Now Mrs. Stopes {180b} argues that in 1748 the monument was "entirely
+reconstructed," and so must have become no longer what Dugdale's man
+drew, but what we see to-day.  It is positively certain that her
+opinion is erroneous.
+
+If ever what we see to-day was substituted for anything like what
+Dugdale's man drew, the date of the substitution is unknown.
+
+Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove her
+theory.  They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an
+unnamed "contemporary account." {181a}  This account Mrs. Stopes,
+with her tireless industry, found in the Wheler manuscripts, among
+papers of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master of the Grammar
+School.  In one paper of September 1740 "the original monument" is
+said to be "much impaired and decayed."  There was a scheme for
+making "a new monument" in Westminster Abbey.  THAT, I venture to
+think, would have been in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and
+style.  But there was no money for a new monument.  Mrs. Stopes also
+found a paper of November 20, 1748, showing that in September 1746,
+Mr. Ward (grandfather of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with "a cry
+of players."  He devoted the proceeds of a performance of Othello to
+the reparation of the then existing monument.  The amount was twelve
+pounds ten shillings.  The affair dragged on, one of the Church-
+wardens, a blacksmith, held the 12 pounds, 10s., and was troublesome.
+The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was
+not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the
+matter.  It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter, is to
+"take care, according to his ability, that the monument shall become
+as like as possible to what it was when first erected."  This appears
+to have been the idea of Mr. Greene.  Another form of words was later
+adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, "to repair and beautify, or
+to have the direction of repairing and beautifying, THE ORIGINAL
+MONUMENT of Shakespeare the poet."  Mrs. Stopes infers, justly in my
+opinion, that Hall "would fill up the gaps, restore what was amissing
+as he thought it ought to be, and finally repaint it according to the
+original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see."  In
+his History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon, {182a} Mr. Wheler
+tells us that this was what Hall did.  "In the year 1748 the monument
+was carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust, &c., as
+much as possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner, of Stratford."
+
+It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the
+painting is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 "painted
+in white," to please Malone.  It was repainted in 1861.
+
+Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do,
+and what, according to Wheler, he did.  She writes:  "It would only
+be giving good value for his money" (12 pounds, 10s.) "to his
+churchwardens if Hall added (sic) a cloak, a pen, and manuscript."
+He "could not help changing" the face, and so on.
+
+Now it was physically impossible to ADD a cloak, a pen, and
+manuscript to such a stone bust as Dugdale's man shows; to take away
+the cushion pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head.  Mr. Hall,
+if he was to give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new
+bust, and, to give us the present monument in place of that shown in
+Dugdale's print, had to construct an entirely new monument.  Now Hall
+was a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and
+sculptor.  Pour tout potage he had but 12 pounds, 10s.  He could not
+do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy "the original
+monument" and make a new monument in Jacobean style.  He was straitly
+ordered to "repair and beautify the original monument"; he did repair
+it, and repainted the colours.  That is all.  I do not quote what
+Halliwell-Phillipps tells us {183a} about the repairing of the
+forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the pen; work which, he
+says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790.  He
+gives no authority, and Baconians may say that he was hoaxed, or
+"lied with circumstance."
+
+Mr. Greenwood {183b} quotes Halliwell-Phillipps's Works of
+Shakespeare (1853), in which he says that the design in Dugdale's
+book "is evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the
+probability being that it was not taken from the monument itself."
+Indeed the designer is so inaccurate that he gives the first word of
+the Latin inscription as "Judicyo," just as Oudry blunders in the
+Latin inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied badly.
+Mr. Greenwood proceeds:  "In his Outlines Halliwell simply ignores
+Dugdale.  His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient to be brought
+to public notice!"  Here Halliwell is accused of suppressing the
+truth; if he invented his minute details about the repeated
+reparation of the writing hand,--not represented in Dugdale's
+design,--he also lied with circumstance.  But he certainly quoted a
+genuine "contemporary account" of the orders for repairing and
+beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he also
+had records for what he says about reparations of the hand and pen.
+He speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts of the
+monument, though not in his Outlines; and I observe that, in Mrs.
+Stopes's papers, there is record of a meeting on December 20, 1748,
+at which mention was made of "the materials" which Hall was to use
+for repairs.
+
+To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and
+bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616-23) and against
+the Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I
+suppose that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590-1620
+can be of a different opinion.  In the same way I do not expect any
+artist or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe's
+Shakespeare (1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for
+anything but copies of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made
+a plaisir.  In Pope's edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with
+some approach to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust
+presents a top-heavy and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from
+"the Chandos portrait," which, in my opinion, is of no more authority
+than any other portrait of Shakespeare.  None of them, I conceive,
+was painted from the life.
+
+The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust,
+copied in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not
+waste words over this speculation.  Mr. Greenwood writes that "if I
+should be told that Dugdale's effigy represented an elderly farmer
+deploring an exceptionally bad harvest, 'I should not feel it to be
+strange!'  Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told
+that it was the presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who
+had fallen from high estate and recognised that all things are but
+vanity."
+
+"_I_ should not feel it to be strange" if a Baconian told me that the
+effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the monument of the
+dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration was made, I
+were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood's words, "Was Dugdale's bust
+thought to bear too much resemblance to one who was not Shakspere of
+Stratford?  Or was it thought that the presence of a woolsack" (the
+cushion) "might be taken as indicating that Shakspere of Stratford
+was indebted for support to a certain Lord Chancellor?" {186a}  Such,
+indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say:  do say, I
+believe.
+
+Dugdale's engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin
+inscription, still on the monument:
+
+
+Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem
+   Terra tegit, populus maeret, Olympus habet:
+
+
+"Earth covers, Olympus" (heaven? or the Muses' Hill?) "holds him who
+was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his
+Daemon" ("Genius").  As for the "Genius," or daemon of Socrates, and
+the permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates
+short; and the use of Olympus for heaven in epitaphs, it is
+sufficient to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. {186b}  The poet who
+made such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause to
+object to another on his monument.  We do not know who erected the
+monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but
+it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) "a clayver man."
+The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was
+conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare's daughter and son-
+in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall.  They exhibit a taste for the mortuary
+memorial and the queer Latin inscription.  Mrs. Hall gratified the
+Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of
+Latin epitaphs. {187a}  It opens like an epigram in the Greek
+Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism.  Mr.
+Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as
+an epitaph.
+
+The famous "Good friend for Jesus' sake forbear," and so on, on the
+stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare
+lies, or lay, is the first of "the last lines written, we are told,"
+{187b} "by the author of Hamlet."  Who tells us that Shakespeare
+wrote the four lines of doggerel?  Is it conceivable that the
+authority for Shakespeare's authorship of the doggerel is a tradition
+gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen's in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged
+over eighty, he says,--criticism makes the clerk twenty years
+younger. {187c}  For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the
+work of William Shakspere of Stratford.
+
+Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will's daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her
+epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father's intelligence.
+
+
+"Witty above her sex, but that's not all,
+Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
+Something of Shakespeare was in THAT, but THIS
+Wholly of Him with whom she's now in bliss." {187d}
+
+
+Thirty-three years after Shakespeare's death he was still thought
+"witty" in Stratford.  But what could Stratford know?  Milton and
+Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of
+the generation after Shakespeare.  But they did not know, how should
+they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the
+plays and poems.  The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among "the
+friends of the Muses" in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of
+men rather given to blab as a general rule.
+
+I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which
+pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions
+about his monument and his grave, and asks if he "died with a curse
+upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might MOVE HIS
+BONES?  A mean and vulgar curse indeed!" {188a}  And the authority
+for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon
+his lips?
+
+About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost
+after Shakespeare's death, W. Hall, a Queen's man, Oxford (the W.
+Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare's
+signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford,
+and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow
+of Queen's.  Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author
+of the mean and vulgar curse.  He adds that there was a great ossuary
+or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled,
+"they would load a great number of waggons."  Not desiring this
+promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to
+clerks and sextons, "for the most part a very ignorant sort of
+people."
+
+If Shakespeare DID, that accommodation of himself to his audience was
+the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. {189a}  Of course there is
+no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse:  that he did is
+only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.
+
+Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot
+enter.  Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio,
+but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio "a good
+send-off."  The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what
+actual portrait, if from any, it was executed.  Richard Burbage is
+known to have amused himself with the art of design; possibly he
+tried his hand on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor.  If
+so, he may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart's embroiderer,
+Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.
+
+That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while
+Shakespeare, as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the
+authorship of the plays.  Ben was a scholar, the darling of both
+Universities; constantly employed about the Court in arranging
+Masques; his learning and his Scottish blood may have led James I to
+notice him.  Ben, in his later years, was much in society;
+fashionable and literary.  He was the father of the literary "tribe
+of Ben."  Thus he naturally sat for his portrait.  In the same way
+George Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox.  But as
+a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor
+of his King, and was the "good pen" of the anti-Marian nobles,
+Murray, Morton, and the rest.  Therefore Buchanan's portrait was
+painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently,
+after his death, from descriptions, for Beza's Icones.  The Folio
+engraving may have no better source.  Without much minute research it
+is hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and, just as in
+Shakespeare's case, {190a} the market, in her own day and in the
+eighteenth century, was flooded with "mock-originals," not even
+derived (in any case known to me) from genuine and authentic
+contemporary works.
+
+One thing is certain about the Stratford bust.  Baconians will
+believe that Dugdale's man correctly represented the bust as it was
+in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs
+of Dugdale's man's fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of
+style; and in spite of documentary evidence that "the original
+monument" was not to be destroyed and replaced by the actual
+monument, but was merely "repaired and beautified" (painted afresh)
+by a local painter.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X:  "THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE"
+
+
+
+In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non-
+Baconian Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to
+address him thus:  Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in
+memory these statements on which you have most eloquently and
+abundantly insisted, namely, that society in Stratford was not only
+not literary, but was illiterate.  Next pardon me for asking you to
+remember that the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century
+did not resemble our fortunate age.  Some people read Shakespeare's,
+Beaumont's, and Fletcher's plays.  This exercise is now very rarely
+practised.  But nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the
+private lives and personal traits of these and several other
+Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, in the modern manner.  Of
+Shakespeare (pardon, I mean Shakspere), the actor, there is one
+contemporary anecdote, in my poor opinion a baseless waggery.  Of
+Beaumont there is none.  Of a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack
+in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at the end of the seventeenth
+century,--nothing better.  Meanwhile of Shakspere the "traditions"
+must be sought either at Stratford or in connection with the London
+Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand very
+late.
+
+As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any
+traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been literary.  That
+is absolutely certain.  Natives at Stratford had, by your own
+hypothesis, scant interest in literary anecdote.  Fifty years after
+Shakespeare's death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any
+sprouts of wit (though it was remembered in 1649, that he was
+"witty"), or any "wood-notes wild," which he may have displayed or
+chirped at an early age.
+
+Such things were of no interest to Stratford.  If he made a speech
+when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the
+circumstance might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even
+be remembered as "the best of his family,"--the least inefficient.
+Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect
+nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.
+
+Let me illustrate by a modern example.  In 1866 I was an
+undergraduate of a year's standing at Balliol College, Oxford,
+certainly not an unlettered academy.  In that year, the early and the
+best poems of a considerable Balliol poet were published:  he had
+"gone down" some eight years before.  Being young and green I eagerly
+sought for traditions about Mr. Swinburne.  One of his
+contemporaries, who took a First in the final Classical Schools, told
+me that "he was a smug."  Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his
+friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed
+that they should combine to pay but a single subscription to the
+Cricket Club.  A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a
+moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm,--
+and told me nothing.  A white-haired College servant said that "Mr.
+Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman."
+
+Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty
+years after Shakspere's death,--a Civil War and the Reign of the
+Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened,--and ask us
+to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere's early brilliance, a
+century before, survived at Stratford.
+
+A very humble parallel may follow.  Some foolish person went seeking
+early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.
+From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and
+interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and
+dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them
+bowled for Gloucestershire and Oxford.  But about me the inquiring
+literary snipe only heard that "Andra was aye the stupid ane o' the
+fam'ly."  Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine
+gloria!  Even THAT was forgotten.
+
+Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow
+townsman's youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from
+sixty to a hundred years after date.  It is not in human nature that
+what was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by
+the grandson.  Go to "Thrums" and ask for literary memories of the
+youth of Mr. Barrie.
+
+Yet {198a} the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of
+Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a
+fever after drink taken (WHERE, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton,
+was remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty
+ignorant places.  Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton
+and Ben?  Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a
+peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant bourgade, where, however,
+the "wit" of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649.
+See the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.
+
+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!" {200a}
+
+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." {201a}  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." {201b}  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 aetiological 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.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 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), {207a} 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."
+{208a}
+
+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." {210a}  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 Caesar, 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 Caesar, 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. {215a}  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?" {216a}
+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." {217a}
+
+Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, {217b} "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'?"
+{218a}
+
+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. {219a}
+
+"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." {219b}  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." {219c}
+
+Tres 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. {220a}  Now the man for whom Ben, in 1623, was
+"doing work"--was BACON,--so Judge Webb says. {220b}
+
+Therefore, by this hypothesis of Mr. Greenwood, {220c} the Great
+Unknown was Bacon,--just the hypothesis of the common Baconian.
+
+Is my reasoning erroneous?  Is the "supposing" suggested by Mr.
+Greenwood {220d} any other than that of Miss Delia Bacon, and Judge
+Webb?  True, Mr. Greenwood's Baconian "supposing" is only a working
+hypothesis:  not a confirmed belief.  But it is useful to his
+argument (see "Ben Jonson and Shakespeare") when he wants to explain
+away Ben's evidence, in his verses in the Folio, to the Stratford
+actor as the Author.
+
+Mr. Greenwood writes, in the first page of his Preface:  "It is no
+part of my plan or intention to defend that theory," "the Baconian
+theory."  Apparently it pops out contrary to the intention of Mr.
+Greenwood.  But pop out it does:  at least I can find no flaw in the
+reasoning of my detection of Bacon:  I see no way out of it except
+this:  after recapitulating what is said about Ben as one of Bacon's
+"good pens" with other details, Mr. Greenwood says, "But no doubt
+that way madness lies!" {221a}  Ah no! not madness, no, but Baconism
+"lies that way."  However, "let it be granted" (as Euclid says in his
+sportsmanlike way) that Mr. Greenwood by no means thinks that his
+"concealed poet" is Bacon--only some one similar and similarly
+situated and still active in 1623, and occupied with other business
+than supervising a collected edition of plays written under his "nom
+de plume" of Shakespeare.  Bacon, too, was busy, with supervising, or
+toiling at the Latin translation of his scientific works, and Ben
+(according to Judge Webb) was busy in turning the Advancement of
+Learning into Latin prose.  Mr. Greenwood quotes, without reference,
+Archbishop Tenison as saying that Ben helped Bacon in doing his works
+into Latin. {221b}  Tenison is a very late witness.  The prophetic
+soul of Bacon did not quite trust English to last as long as Latin,
+or he thought Latin, the lingua franca of Europe in his day, more
+easily accessible to foreign students, as, of course, it was.  Thus
+Bacon was very busy; so was Ben.  The sad consequence of Ben's
+business, perhaps, is that the editing of the Folio is notoriously
+bad; whether Ben were the Editor or not, it is infamously bad.
+
+Conceivably Mr. Greenwood is of the same opinion.  He says, "It
+stands admitted that a very large part of that volume" (the Folio)
+"consists of work that is not 'Shakespeare's' at all."
+
+How strange, if Ben edited it for the Great Unknown--who knew, if any
+human being knew, what work was "Shakespeare's"!  On Mr. Greenwood's
+hypothesis, {222a} or "supposing," the Unknown Author "may well have
+conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays
+which had been written" (not "published," WRITTEN) "under the name of
+Shakespeare, and, being himself busy with other matters, he may have
+entrusted the business to" some "good pen," "and why not to"--Ben.
+Nevertheless "a very large part of that volume consists of work that
+is not 'Shakespeare's' at all." {222b}  How did this occur?  The book
+{222c} is "that very doubtful 'canon.'"  How, if "Shakespeare's" man
+edited it for "Shakespeare"?  Did "Shakespeare" not care what stuff
+was placed under his immortal "nom de plume"?
+
+It is not my fault if I think that Mr. Greenwood's hypotheses {222d}-
+-the genuine "Shakespeare" either revised his own works, or put Ben
+on the editorial task--are absolutely contradicted by his statements
+in another part of his book. {222e}  For the genuine "Shakespeare"
+knew what plays he had written, knew what he could honestly put forth
+as his own, as "Shakespeare's."  Or, if he placed the task of editing
+in Ben's hands, he must have told Ben what plays were of his own
+making.  In either case the Folio would contain these, and no others.
+But--"the plat contraire,"--the very reverse,--is stated by Mr.
+Greenwood.  "It stands admitted that a very large portion of that
+volume" (the Folio) "consists of work that is not 'Shakespeare's'"
+(is not Bacon's, or the other man's) "at all." {223a}  Then away fly
+the hypotheses {223b} that the auto-Shakespeare, or that Ben,
+employed by the auto-Shakespeare (apparently Bacon) revised, edited,
+and prepared for publication the auto-Shakespearean plays.  For Mr.
+Greenwood "has already dealt with Titus (Andronicus) and Henry VI,"
+{223c} and proved them not to be auto-Shakespearean--and he adds
+"there are many other plays in that very doubtful 'canon'" (the
+Folio) "which, by universal admission, contain much non-Shakespearean
+composition." {223d}  Perhaps! but if so the two hypotheses, {223e}
+that either the genuine Shakespeare {223f} revised ("is it not a more
+natural solution that 'Shakespeare' himself revised his works for
+publication, and that some part, at any rate, of this revision {223g}
+was done after 1616 and before 1623?"), or {223h} that he gave Ben
+(who was working, by the conjecture, for Bacon) the task of editing
+the Folio,--are annihilated.  For neither the auto-Shakespeare (if
+honest), nor Ben (if sober), could have stuffed the Folio full of
+non-Shakespearean work,--including four "non-Shakespearean" plays,--
+nor could the Folio be "that very doubtful canon." {224a}  Again, if
+either the auto-Shakespeare or Ben following his instructions, were
+Editor, neither could have, as the Folio Editor had "evidently no
+little doubt about" Troilus and Cressida. {224b}
+
+Neither Ben, nor the actual Simon Pure, the author, the auto-
+Shakespeare, could fail to know the truth about Trodus and Cressida.
+But the Editor {224c} did NOT know the truth, the whole canon is
+"doubtful."  Therefore the hypothesis, the "supposing," that the
+actual author did the revising, {224d} and the other hypothesis that
+he gave Ben the work, {224e} seem to me wholly impossible.  But Mr.
+Greenwood needs the "supposings" of pp. 290, 293; and as he rejects
+Titus Andronicus and Henry VI (both in the Folio), he also needs the
+contradictory views of pp. 351, 358.  On which set of supposings and
+averments does he stand to win?
+
+Perhaps he thinks to find a way out of what appears to me to be a
+dilemma in the following fashion:  He will not accept Titus
+Andronicus and Henry VI, though both are in the Folio, as the work of
+HIS "Shakespeare," his Unknown, the Bacon of the Baconians.  Well, we
+ask, if your Unknown, or Bacon, or Ben,--instructed by Bacon, or by
+the Unknown,--edited the Folio, how could any one of the three insert
+Titus, and Henry VI, and be "in no little doubt about" Troilus and
+Cressida?  Bacon, or the Unknown, or the Editor employed by either,
+knew perfectly well which plays either man could honestly claim as
+his own work, done under the "nom de plume" of "William Shakespeare"
+(with or without the hyphen).  Yet the Editor of the Folio does not
+know--and Mr. Greenwood does know--Henry VI and Titus are "wrong
+ones."
+
+Mr. Greenwood's way out, if I follow him, is this:  {225a} "Judge
+Stotsenburg asks, 'Who wrote The Taming of a Shrew printed in 1594,
+and who wrote Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, or King Lear referred to in
+the Diary?'" (Henslowe's).  The Judge continues:  "Neither Collier
+nor any of the Shaxper commentators make (sic) any claim to their
+authorship in behalf of William Shaxper.  Since these plays have the
+same names as those included in the Folio of 1623 the presumption is
+that they are the same plays until the contrary is shown.  Of course
+it may be shown, either that those in the Folio are entirely
+different except in name, or that these plays were revised, improved,
+and dressed by some one whom they" (who?) "called Shakespeare."
+
+Mr. Greenwood says, "My own conviction is that . . . these plays were
+'revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare.'" {226a}  (Whom WHO called Shakespeare?)  In that case
+these plays,--say Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, Part 1,--which Mr.
+Greenwood denies to HIS "Shakespeare" were just as much HIS
+Shakespeare's plays as any other plays (and there are several), which
+HIS Shakespeare "revised, improved, and dressed."  Yet HIS
+Shakespeare is NOT author of Henry VI, {226b} not the author of Titus
+Andronicus. {226c}  "Mr. Anders," writes Mr. Greenwood, "makes what I
+think to be a great error in citing Henry VI and Titus as genuine
+plays of Shakespeare." {226d}
+
+He hammers at this denial in nineteen references in his Index to
+Titus Andronicus.  Yet Ben, or Bacon, or the Unknown thought that
+these plays WERE "genuine plays" of "Shakespeare," the concealed
+author--Bacon or Mr. Greenwood's man.  It appears that the immense
+poet who used the "nom de plume" of "Shakespeare" did not know the
+plays of which he could rightfully call himself the author; that (not
+foreseeing Mr. Greenwood's constantly repeated objections) he boldly
+annexed four plays, or two certainly, which Mr. Greenwood denies to
+him, and another about which "the Folio Editor was in no little
+doubt."
+
+Finally, {227a} Mr. Greenwood is "convinced," "it is my conviction"
+that some plays which he often denies to his "Shakespeare" were
+"revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare."  That some one, if he edited or caused to be edited the
+Folio, thought that his revision, improvement, and dressing up of the
+plays gave him a right to claim their authorship--and Mr. Greenwood,
+a dozen times and more, denies to him their authorship.
+
+One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic's meaning.  The
+Taming of a Shrew, Titus, Henry VI, and King Lear, referred to in
+Henslowe's "Diary," are not "Shakespearean," we are repeatedly told.
+But "my own conviction is that . . . " these plays were "revised,
+improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare."  But
+to be revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare, is to be as truly "Shakespearean" work as is any play so
+handled "by Shakespeare."  Thus the plays mentioned are as truly
+"Shakespearean" as any others in which "Shakespeare" worked on an
+earlier canvas, and also Titus "is not SHAKESPEAREAN at all."  Mr.
+Greenwood, I repeat, constantly denies the "Shakespearean" character
+to Titus and Henry VI.  "The conclusion of the whole matter is that
+Titus and The Trilogy of Henry VI are not the work of Shakespeare:
+that his hand is probably not to be found at all in Titus, and only
+once or twice, if at all, in Henry VI, Part I, but that he it
+probably was who altered and remodelled the two parts of the old
+Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster, thereby producing
+Henry VI, Parts II and III." {228a}
+
+Yet {228b} Titus and Henry VI appear as "revised, improved, and
+dressed" by the mysterious "some one whom they called Shakespeare."
+If Mr. Greenwood's conclusion {228c} be correct, "Shakespeare" had no
+right to place Henry VI, Part I, and Titus in his Folio.  If his
+"conviction" {228d} be correct, Shakespeare had as good a right to
+them as to any of the plays which he revised, and improved, and
+dressed.  They MUST be "Shakespearean" if Mr. Greenwood is right
+{228e} in his suggestion that "Shakespeare" either revised his works
+for publication between 1616 and 1623, or set his man, Ben Jonson,
+upon that business.  Yet neither one nor the other knew what to make
+of Troilus and Cressida.  "The Folio Editor had, evidently, no little
+doubt about that play." {228f}
+
+So neither "Shakespeare" nor Ben, instructed by him, can have been
+"the Folio Editor."  Consequently Mr. Greenwood must abandon his
+suggestion that either man was the Editor, and may return to his
+rejection of Titus and Henry VI, Part I.  But he clings to it.  He
+finds in Henslowe's Diary "references to, and records of the writing
+of, such plays" as, among others, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI.
+{229a}
+
+Mr. Greenwood, after rejecting a theory of some one, says, "Far more
+likely does it appear that there was a great man of the time whose
+genius was capable of 'transforming dross into gold,' who took these
+plays, and, in great part, rewrote and revised them, leaving
+sometimes more, and sometimes less of the original work; and that so
+rewritten, revised, and transformed they appeared as the plays of
+'Shake-speare.'" {229b}
+
+This statement is made {229c} about "these plays," including Titus
+Andronicus and Henry VI, while {229d} "Titus and the Trilogy of Henry
+VI are not the work of Shakespeare . . . his hand is probably not to
+be found at all in Titus, and only once or twice in Henry VI, Part
+I," though he probably made Parts II and III out of older plays.
+
+I do not know where to have the critic.  If Henry VI, Part I, and
+Titus are in no sense by "Shakespeare," then neither "Shakespeare nor
+Ben for him edited or had anything to do with the editing of the
+Folio.  If either or both had to do with the editing, as the critic
+suggests, then he is wrong in denying Shakespearean origin to Titus
+and Henry VI, Part I.
+
+Of course one sees a way out of the dilemma for the great auto-
+Shakespeare himself, who, by one hypothesis, handed over the editing
+of his plays to Ben (HE, by Mr. Greenwood's "supposing," was deviling
+at literary jobs for Bacon).  The auto-Shakespeare merely tells Ben
+to edit his plays, and never even gives him a list of them.  Then Ben
+brings him the Folio, and the author looks at the list of Plays.
+
+"Mr. Jonson," he says, "I have hitherto held thee for an honest
+scholar and a deserving man in the quality thou dost profess.  But
+thou hast brought me a maimed and deformed printed copy of that which
+I did write for my own recreation, not wishful to be known for so
+light a thing as a poet.  Moreover, thou hast placed among these my
+trifles, four plays to which I never put a finger, and others in
+which I had no more than a thumb.  The Seneschal, Mr. Jonson, will
+pay thee what is due to thee; thy fardels shall be sent whithersoever
+thou wilt, and, Mary!  Mr. Jonson, I bid thee never more be officer
+of mine."
+
+This painful discourse must have been held at Gorhambury,--if Ben
+edited the Folio--for Francis.
+
+It is manifest, I hope, that about the Folio Mr. Greenwood speaks
+with two voices, and these very discordant.  It is also manifest
+that, whoever wrote the plays left his materials in deep neglect, and
+that, when they were collected, some one gathered them up in extreme
+disorder.  It is extraordinary that the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood
+do not see the fallacy of their own reasoning in this matter of the
+Folio.  They constantly ridicule the old view that the actor, Will
+Shakspere (if, by miracle, he were the author of the plays), could
+have left them to take their fortunes.  They are asked, what did
+other playwrights do in that age?  They often parted with their whole
+copyright to the actors of this or that company, or to Henslowe.  The
+new owners could alter the plays at will, and were notoriously
+anxious to keep them out of print, lest other companies should act
+them.  As Mr. Greenwood writes, {231a} "Such, we are told, was the
+universal custom with dramatists of the day; they 'kept no copies' of
+their plays, and thought no more about them.  It will, I suppose, be
+set down to fanaticism that I should doubt the truth of this
+proposition, that I doubt if it be consonant with the known facts of
+human nature."  But whom, except Jonson, does Mr. Greenwood find
+editing and publishing his plays?  Beaumont, Fletcher, Heywood?  No!
+
+If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as bad as
+Will's.  If he were alive and revised his own work for publication,
+{231b} he did it as the office cat might have done it in hours of
+play.  If, on the other side, he handed the editorial task over to
+Ben, {232a} then he did not even give Ben a list of his genuine
+works.  Mr. Greenwood cites the case of Ben Jonson, a notorious and,
+I think, solitary exception.  Ben was and often proclaimed himself to
+be essentially a scholar.  He took as much pains in prefacing,
+editing, and annotating his plays, as he would have taken had the
+texts been those of Greek tragedians.
+
+Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour of the
+actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he did not
+bestir himself, and bring them out in a collected edition.  Yet no
+English dramatist ventured on doing such a thing, till Ben thus
+collected his "works" (and was laughed at) in 1616.  The example
+might have encouraged Will to be up and doing, but he died early in
+1616.  If Will were NOT the author, what care was Bacon, or the
+Unknown, taking of his many manuscript plays, and for the proper
+editing of those which had appeared separately in pamphlets?  As
+indolent and casual as Will, the great Author, Bacon or another, left
+the plays to take their chances.  Mr. Greenwood says that "IF THE
+AUTHOR" (Bacon or somebody very like him) "HAD BEEN CARELESS ABOUT
+KEEPING COPIES OF HIS MANUSCRIPTS . . . " {232b}  What an "if" in the
+case of the great Author!  This gross neglect, infamous in Will, may
+thus have been practised by the Great Unknown himself.
+
+In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, "There is overwhelming authority for
+the view that Titus Andronicus is not SHAKESPEAREAN at all." {233a}
+In that case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for
+either, can have been the person who put Titus into the Folio.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII:  BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
+
+
+
+The evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author
+with Shakspere the actor, is "the strength of the Stratfordian
+faith," says Mr. Greenwood.  "But I think it will be admitted that
+the various Jonsonian utterances with regard to 'Shakespeare' are by
+no means easy to reconcile one with the other." {237a}
+
+It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood's forty-seven pages
+about the evidence of Jonson.  But, first, whenever in written words
+or in reported conversation, Ben speaks of Shakespeare by name, he
+speaks of his WORKS:  in 1619 to Drummond of Hawthornden; in 1623 in
+commendatory verses to the Folio; while, about 1630, probably, in his
+posthumously published Discourses, he writes on Shakespeare as the
+friend and "fellow" of the players, on Shakespeare as his own friend,
+and as a dramatist.  On each of these three occasions, Ben's TONE
+varies.  In 1619 he said no more to Drummond of Hawthornden
+(apparently on two separate occasions) than that Shakespeare "lacked
+art," and made the mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.
+
+In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond
+he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in
+an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the
+commendatory verses in the Folio.  He spoke still more harshly of
+Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus,
+and Tyraeus!  He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with whom he had
+first quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with him in a
+play; and very generously and to his great peril, sharing his
+imprisonment.  To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he "beat Marston
+and took away his pistol."  Of Sir John Beaumont, brother of the
+dramatist, Ben had written a most hyperbolical eulogy in verse;
+luckily for Sir John, to Drummond Ben did not speak of him.  Such was
+Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical; in conversation "a despiser of
+others, and praiser of himself."  Compare Ben's three remarks about
+Donne, all made to Drummond.  Donne deserved hanging for breaking
+metre; Donne would perish for not being understood:  and Donne was in
+some points the first of living poets.
+
+Mr. Greenwood's effort to disable Jonson's evidence rests on the
+contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare's poetry, in notices
+scattered through some thirty years.  Jonson, it is argued, cannot on
+each occasion mean Will.  He must now mean Will, now the Great
+Unknown, and now--both at once.  Yet I have proved that Ben was the
+least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion, and on his
+humour at the moment.  This is a commonplace of literary history.
+The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows it, ignores
+it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown to his
+readers.  We have noted Ben's words of 1619, and touched on his
+panegyric of 1623.  Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote in his
+manuscript book Discourses an affectionate but critical page on
+Shakespeare as a man and an author.  Always, in prose, and in verse,
+and in recorded conversation, Ben explicitly identified Shakspere
+(William, of Stratford) with the author of the plays usually ascribed
+to him.  But the Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age), and the
+anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret
+Ben's words on the theory that, in 1623, he "had his tongue in his
+cheek"; that, like Odysseus, he "mingled things false with true,"
+that THEY know what is true from what is false, and can undo the many
+knots which Ben tied in his tongue.  How they succeed we shall see.
+
+In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name (1619,
+1623, 1630?), Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival at a much
+earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in The Poetaster
+(1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist in an epigram, Poet-Ape,
+published in his collected works of 1616; but probably written as
+early as 1602.  It is well known that in 1598 Shakespeare's company
+acted Ben's Every Man in His Humour.  It appears that he conceived
+some grudge against the actors, and apparently against Shakespeare
+and other playwrights, for, in 1601, his Poetaster is a satire both
+on playwrights and on actors, whom he calls "apes."  The apparent
+attacks on Shakespeare are just such as Ben, if angry and envious,
+would direct against him; while we know of no other poet-player of
+the period to whom they could apply.  For example, in The Poetaster,
+Histrio, the actor, is advised to ingratiate himself with Pantalabus,
+"gent'man parcel-poet, his father was a man of worship, I tell thee."
+This is perhaps unmistakably a blow at Shakespeare, who had recently
+acquired for his father and himself arms, and the pleasure of writing
+himself "gentleman."  This "parcel-poet gent'man" "pens lofty, in a
+new stalking style,"--he is thus an author, he "pens," and in a high
+style.  He is called Pantalabus, from the Greek words for "to TAKE UP
+ALL," which means that, as poet, he is a plagiarist.  Jonson repeats
+this charge in his verses called Poet-Ape -
+
+
+"HE TAKES UP ALL," makes each man's wit his own,
+And told of this, he slights it."
+
+
+In a scene added to The Poetaster in 1616, the author (Ben) is
+advised not
+
+
+"With a sad and serious verse to wound
+Pantalabus, railing in his saucy jests,"
+
+
+and obviously slighting the charges of plagiarism.  Perhaps Ben is
+glancing at Shakespeare, who, if accused of plagiary by an angry
+rival, would merely laugh.
+
+A reply to the Poetaster, namely Satiromastix (by Dekker and
+Marston?), introduces Jonson himself as babbling darkly about "Mr.
+Justice Shallow," and "an Innocent Moor" (Othello?).  Here is
+question of "administering strong pills" to Jonson; THEN,
+
+
+"What lumps of hard and indigested stuff,
+Of bitter SATIRISM, of ARROGANCE,
+Of SELF-LOVE, of DETRACTION, of a black
+And stinking INSOLENCE should we fetch up!"
+
+
+This "pill" is a reply to Ben's "purge" for the poets in his
+Poetaster.  Oh, the sad old stuff!
+
+Referring to Jonson's Poetaster, and to Satiromastix, the counter-
+attack, we find a passage in the Cambridge play, The Return from
+Parnassus (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 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 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 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." {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 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."
+{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 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 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 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?" {249a}
+
+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. {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. Basse, "but the
+evidence of authorship 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
+pass 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 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, {253a}
+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." {254a}
+
+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. {255a})  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 Caesar, one speaking to him, 'Caesar, thou dost
+me wrong.'  He replied, 'Caesar 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 Caesar,--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." {258a}
+
+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
+{259a} "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." {260a}
+
+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,
+
+
+"Thou stand'st as if some mystery thou didst."
+
+
+"What was that 'mystery'?" asks Mr. Greenwood. {260b}  What indeed?
+And what has all this to do with Ben's commendatory verses for the
+Folio, two years later?  Mr. Greenwood also surmises, as we have
+seen, {260c} that Jonson was with Bacon, helping to translate The
+Advancement of Learning in June, 1623.
+
+Let us suppose that he was:  what has that to do with Ben's verses
+for the Folio?  Does Mr. Greenwood mean to hint that BACON was the
+"efficient cause operating to induce" Ben "to give the best possible
+send-off" to the Folio?  One does not see what interest Bacon had in
+stimulating the enthusiasm of Ben, unless we accept Bacon as author
+of the plays, which Mr. Greenwood does not.  If Mr. Greenwood thinks
+that Bacon was the author of the plays, then the facts are suitable
+to his belief.  But if he does not,--"I hold no brief for the
+Baconians," he says,--how is all this passage on Ben's visits to
+Bacon concerned with the subject in hand?
+
+Between the passage on some "efficient cause" "at the back of Ben's
+mind," {261a} and the passage on Ben's visits to Bacon in 1621-3,
+{261b} six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between
+the "efficient cause" of Ben's verses of 1623, and his visits to
+Bacon in 1621-3.  These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben's
+laudations of Bacon, by name, in his Discoveries.  The first is
+entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator.  Bacon is next
+mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as "HE WHO HATH FILLED UP ALL
+NUMBERS, and performed that in our tongue which may be preferred or
+compared either to INSOLENT GREECE OR HAUGHTY ROME," words used of
+Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio verses.
+
+Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson's Catalogue, to judge by the names
+he cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker,
+Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that "he is
+thinking mainly of wits and orators of his own and the preceding
+generation," not of poets specially.  This is obvious; why should Ben
+name Shakespeare with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop Gardiner,
+Egerton, Sandys, and Savile?  Yet "it is remarkable that no mention
+should be made of the great dramatist."  Where is Spenser named, or
+Beaumont, or Chaucer, with whom Ben ranked Shakespeare?  Ben quoted
+of Bacon the line he wrote long before of Shakespeare as a poet,
+about "insolent Greece," and all this is "remarkable," and Mr.
+Greenwood finds it "not surprising" {262a} that the Baconians dwell
+on the "extraordinary coincidence of expression," as if Ben were
+incapable of repeating a happy phrase from himself, and as if we
+should wonder at anything the Baconians may say or do.
+
+Another startling coincidence is that, in Discoveries, Ben said of
+Shakespeare "his wit was in his own power," and wished that "the rule
+of it had been so too."  Of Bacon, Ben wrote, "his language, where he
+could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious."  Thus Bacon HAD
+"the rule of his own wit," Bacon "COULD spare or pass by a jest,"
+whereas Shakespeare apparently could not--so like were the two
+Dromios in this particular!  Strong in these convincing arguments,
+the Baconians ask (not so Mr. Greenwood, he is no Baconian), "were
+there then TWO writers of whom this description was appropriate . . .
+Was there only one, and was it of Bacon, under the name of
+"Shakespeare," that Ben wrote De Shakespeare nostrati?
+
+Read it again, substituting "Bacon" for "Shakespeare."  "I remember
+the players," and so on, and what has Bacon to do here?  "Sometimes
+it was necessary that BACON should be stopped."  "Many times BACON
+fell into those things could not escape laughter," such as Caesar's
+supposed line, "and such like, which were ridiculous."  "BACON
+redeemed his vices with his virtues.  There was ever more in BACON to
+be praised than to be pardoned."
+
+Thus freely, according to the Baconians, speaks Ben of Bacon, whom he
+here styles "Shakespeare,"--Heaven knows why! while crediting him
+with the players as his friends.  Ben could not think or speak thus
+of Bacon.  Mr. Greenwood occupies his space with these sagacities of
+the Baconians; one marvels why he takes the trouble.  We are asked
+why Ben wrote so little and that so cool ("I loved him on this side
+idolatry as much as any") about Shakespeare.  Read through Ben's
+Discoveries:  what has he to say about any one of his great
+contemporary dramatists, from Marlowe to Beaumont?  He says nothing
+about any of them; though he had panegyrised them, as he panegyrised
+Beaumont, in verse.  In his prose Discoveries he speaks, among
+English dramatists, of Shakespeare alone.
+
+We are also asked by the Baconians to believe that his remarks on
+Bacon under the name of Shakespeare are really an addition to his
+more copious and infinitely more reverential observations on Bacon,
+named by his own name; "I have and do reverence him for the greatness
+that was only proper to himself."  Also (where Bacon is spoken of as
+Shakespeare) "He redeemed his vices by his virtues.  There was ever
+more in him to be praised than to be pardoned . . . Sometimes it was
+necessary that he should be stopped . . . Many times he fell into
+those things that could not escape laughter."
+
+These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous.  The person
+spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians, and Mr.
+Greenwood sympathetically alludes to their ideas, {264a} which I
+cannot qualify in courteous terms.  Baconians "would, of course,
+explain the difficulty by saying that however sphinx-like were
+Jonson's utterances, he had clearly distinct in his own mind two
+different personages, viz. Shakspere the player, and Shakespeare the
+real author of the plays and poems, and that if in the perplexing
+passage quoted from the Discoveries he appears to confound one with
+the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had been imposed
+on him."  They WOULD say, they DO say all that.  Ben is not to let
+out that Bacon is the author.  So he tells us of Bacon that he often
+made himself ridiculous, and so forth,--but he PRETENDS that he is
+speaking of Shakespeare.
+
+All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the search
+for "the efficient cause" of Ben's panegyric (1623), in the Folio, on
+his Beloved Mr. William Shakespeare, and the discovery of Ben's
+visits to Bacon in 1621-3.
+
+Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew the
+secret of Bacon's authorship, and, stimulated by his hospitality,
+applauded his works in the Folio, while, as he must not disclose the
+secret, he throughout speaks of Bacon as Shakespeare, puns on that
+name in the line about seeming "to shake a lance," and salutes the
+Lord of Gorhambury as "Sweet Swan of Avon"?  Mr. Greenwood cannot
+mean that; for he is not a Baconian.  What DOES he mean?
+
+Put together his pages 483, 489-491.  On the former we find how "it
+would appear" that Jonson thought the issue of the Folio (1623) "a
+very special occasion," and that perhaps if we could only "get to the
+back of his 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."  Then skip to pp. 489-491, and you find very
+special occasions:  Bacon's birthday feast with its" mystery"; Ben as
+one of Bacon's "good pens," in 1623.  "The best of these good pens,
+it seems, was Jonson." {266a}  On what evidence does it "seem"?  The
+opinion of Judge Webb.
+
+Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, "the efficient
+cause operating to induce" Ben "to give the best possible send-off"
+to the Folio?  How could this be the "efficient cause" if Bacon were
+not the author of the plays?
+
+Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,
+
+
+"Stands as if some mystery he did."
+
+
+On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were a man
+likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be elaborately false
+about the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, it is hopelessly
+impossible to bring the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood (who "holds no
+brief for the Baconians") to my point of view.  Mr. Greenwood rides
+off thus--what the Baconians do is unimportant.
+
+"There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are justifiable,
+some that it is actually a duty to tell."  It may be so; I pray that
+I may never tell any of them (or any more of them).
+
+Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever he
+plumply denied that he wrote the Waverley novels.  I do not judge Sir
+Walter.  Heaven forbid!  But if, in Mr. Greenwood's words, he, "we
+are told, thought it perfectly justifiable for a writer who wished to
+preserve his anonymity, to deny, when questioned, the authorship of a
+work, since the interrogator had no right to put such a question to
+him," {267a} I disagree with Sir Walter.  Many other measures, in
+accordance with the conditions of each case, were open to him.  Some
+are formulated by his own Bucklaw, in The Bride of Lammermoor, as
+regards questions about what occurred on his bridal night.  Bucklaw
+would challenge the man, and cut the lady, who asked questions.  But
+Scott's case, as cited, applies only to Bacon (or Mr. Greenwood's
+Unknown), if HE were asked whether or not he were the author of the
+plays.  No idiot, at that date, was likely to put the question!  But,
+if anyone did ask, Bacon must either evade, or deny, or tell the
+truth.
+
+On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or tell the
+truth.  But the parallel of Scott is not applicable to any other
+person except to the author who wishes to preserve his anonymity, and
+is questioned.  The parallel does not apply to Ben.  HE had not
+written the Shakespearean plays.  Nobody was asking HIM if he had
+written them.  If he knew that the author was Bacon, and knew it
+under pledge of secrecy, and was asked (per impossibile) "Who wrote
+these plays?" he had only to say, "Look at the title-page."  But no
+mortal was asking Ben the question.  But we are to suppose that, in
+the panegyric and in Discoveries, Ben chooses to assert, first, that
+Shakespeare was his Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon; and that he
+"loved him, on this side idolatry, as much as any."  There is no
+evidence that he did love Shakespeare, except his own statement,
+when, according to the Baconians, he is really speaking of Bacon,
+and, according to Mr. Greenwood, of an unknown person, singularly
+like Bacon.  Consequently, unless we can prove that Ben really loved
+the actor, he is telling a disgustingly hypocritical and wholly
+needless falsehood, both before and after the death of Bacon.  To be
+silent about the authorship of a book, an authorship which is the
+secret of your friend and patron, is one thing and a blameless thing.
+All the friends, some twenty, to whom Scott confided the secret of
+his authorship were silent.  But not one of them publicly averred
+that the author was their very dear friend, So-and-so, who was not
+Scott, and perhaps not their friend at all.  That was Ben's line.
+Thus the parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood, twice, {268a} is
+no parallel.  It has no kind of analogy with Ben's alleged
+falsehoods, so elaborate, so incomprehensible except by Baconians,
+and, if he did not love the actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably
+hypocritical, and open to instant detection.
+
+It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which Ben is
+charged.  But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of writing his
+novels, which, let us say, he signed "James Hogg," and died without
+confessing his secret, and without taking his elaborate precautions
+for its preservation on record.
+
+Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott's secret, under vow of
+silence, and was determined to keep it at any cost.  He therefore,
+writing after the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in Scott's lifetime,
+publishes verses declaring that Hogg was his "beloved" (an enormous
+fib), and that Hogg, "Sweet Swan of Ettrick," was the author of the
+Waverley novels.
+
+To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott's death, leaves a
+note in prose to the effect that, while he loved Hogg on this side
+idolatry (again, a monstrous fable), he must confess that Hogg,
+author of the Waverley novels, often fell into things that were
+ridiculous; and often needed to have a stopper put on him for all
+these remarks.  Lockhart, while speaking of Hogg, is thinking of
+Scott--and he makes the remarks solely to conceal Scott's authorship
+of the novels--of which, on the hypothesis, nobody suspected Scott to
+be the author.  Lockhart must then have been what the Baconian Mr.
+Theobald calls Mr. Churton Collins, "a measureless liar,"--all for no
+reason.
+
+Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no parallel,
+of Scott's denying his own authorship, goes on, "for all we know,
+Jonson might have seen nothing in the least objectionable in the
+publication by some great personage of his dramatic works under a
+pseudonym" (under another man's name really), "even though that
+pseudonym led to a wrong conception as to the authorship; and that,
+if, being a friend of that great personage, and working in his
+service" (Ben worked, by the theory, in Bacon's), "he had solemnly
+engaged to preserve the secret inviolate, and not to reveal it even
+to posterity, then DOUBTLESS ('I thank thee, Jew' (meaning Sir Sidney
+Lee), 'for teaching me that word'!) he would have remained true to
+that solemn pledge." {270a}
+
+To remain "true," Ben had only to hold his peace.  But he lied up and
+down, and right and left, and even declared that Bacon was a friend
+of the players, and needed to be shut up, and made himself a
+laughing-stock in his plays,--styling Bacon" Shakespeare."  All this,
+and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe before we
+can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines can we get
+rid of Ben Jonson's testimony to the authorship of Will Shakspere,
+Gent.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII:  THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON
+
+
+
+Let us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find
+nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal.  Bacon was the
+author of the Shakespearean plays, they tell us.  Let us look rapidly
+at his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic
+supremacy, and imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous, when
+we consider his occupations and his ruling passion?
+
+Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware of it,
+and had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to do.  While
+still at Cambridge, and therefore before he was fifteen, he was
+utterly dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr. Rawley, with the
+scientific doctrines of the Schools.  In the study of nature they
+reasoned from certain accepted ideas, a priori principles, not from
+what he came to call "interrogation of Nature."  There were, indeed,
+and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school doctors
+went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing.  As Mr. Spedding
+puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, "If our study of nature be thus
+barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not a better method
+be found? . . .  Upon the conviction 'This may be done,' followed at
+once the question, HOW may it be done?  Upon that question answered
+followed the resolution to try and do it."
+
+This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon, "the event
+which had a greater influence than any other upon his character and
+future course.  From that moment he had a vocation which employed and
+stimulated him . . . an object to live for as wide as humanity, as
+immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough
+to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations."
+{274a}  The vocation, the idea, the object, were not poetical.
+
+In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was
+much concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in
+France, and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good
+government of his native country.  He could only aid that cause by
+the favour of Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament,
+where, despite his desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed
+the Queen.  He was obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts,
+legal and polemical literature, as were set him by people in power.
+With these three great objects filling his heart, inspiring his
+ambition, and occupying his energies and time, we cannot easily
+believe, without direct external evidence, that he, or any mortal,
+could have leisure and detachment from his main objects (to which we
+may add his own advancement) sufficient to enable him to compose the
+works ascribed to Shakespeare.
+
+Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might have
+penned sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, he reports that he wrote
+"his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which he called
+Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time,'" and "we need
+not doubt that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to do."
+{275a}  For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer
+(of which I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a
+man's hours.  In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear
+anything very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote
+a long pamphlet, "Touching the Controversies of the Church of
+England." {275b}  He had then leisure enough; that he was not
+anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor
+disprove:  but there is no proof that he wrote Love's Labour's Lost!
+By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never
+would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy.  He
+was apparently hard at scientific work.  "I account my ordinary
+course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of
+action are."  He adds, "The contemplative planet carries me away
+wholly," and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls
+"vast contemplative ends."  These he proceeds to describe:  he does
+NOT mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece
+(1594), nor of comedies!  "I have taken all knowledge to be my
+province," and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of
+his period.  "If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers
+whereof the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and
+verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular
+traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I
+should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and
+profitable inventions and discoveries . . . This, whether it be
+curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably)
+philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be removed."  If
+Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the truth, he
+will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, " . . .
+and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of
+truth . . . " {276a}  Really, from first to last he was the prince of
+begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions,
+reversions, money, and more money.
+
+Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as
+Shelley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, "my Lord Treasurer
+Burghley."  What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman's
+philanthropy, and "vast speculative ends" (how MODERN it all is!),
+and the rest of it?  But just because Bacon, at thirty-one, IS so
+extremely "green," going to "take all knowledge for his province (if
+some one will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive
+that he was in earnest about his reformation of science.  Surely no
+Baconian will deny it!  Being so deeply in earnest, taking his "study
+and meditation" so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and
+Adonis, and whatever plays of the period,--say, Love's Labour's Lost,
+The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, Part I,--are attributed to
+him, about this time, by Baconians.  Of course my view is merely
+personal or "subjective."  The Baconians' view is also "subjective."
+I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by
+his vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in
+science, is what he DID, as far as he was able.  His other desires,
+his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs,
+he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.
+There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition
+in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other
+professed playwrights:  no room for plays done under the absurd
+pseudonym of an ignorant actor.
+
+You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do.  Argument is
+unavailing.  I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter
+to Cecil.  Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast
+LITERARY aim.  They must take his alternative--to be "some sorry
+bookmaker, OR a pioneer in that mine of truth," as meaning that he
+would either be the literary hack of a company of players, OR the
+founder of a regenerating philosophy.  But, at that date, playwrights
+could not well be called "bookmakers," for the owners of the plays
+did their best to keep them from appearing as printed books.  If
+Bacon by "bookmaker" meant "playwright," he put a modest value on his
+poetical work!
+
+Meanwhile (1591-2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful,
+and famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much
+excellent advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was
+not taken.  It is not a novel suggestion, that Essex is the young man
+to whom Bacon is so passionately attached in the Sonnets
+traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.  "I applied myself to him"
+(that is, to Essex), says Bacon, "in a manner which, I think,
+happeneth rarely among men."  The poet of the Sonnets applies himself
+to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily) "happeneth rarely
+among men."
+
+It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon's life.  But, if you
+pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find that
+he does not speak OPENLY of a tenderly passionate attachment to that
+young man; not more than THIS, "I did nothing but advise and ruminate
+with myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and
+memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship's honour,
+fortune, or service." {279a}  As Bacon did nothing but these things
+(1591-2), he had no great leisure for writing poetry and plays.
+Moreover, speaking as a poet, in the Sonnets, he might poetically
+exaggerate his intense amatory devotion to Essex into the symbolism
+of his passionate verse.  WAS ESSEX THEN A MARRIED MAN?  If so, the
+Sonneteer's insistence on his marrying must be symbolical of--
+anything else you please.
+
+We know that Bacon, at this period, "did nothing" but "ruminate"
+about Essex.  The words are his own! (1604).  No plays, no Venus and
+Adonis, nothing but enthusiastic service of Essex and the Sonnets.
+Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Essex
+(November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed such matter as "Mr.
+Bacon in Praise of Knowledge" (containing his usual views about
+regenerating science), and "Mr. Bacon's Discourse in Praise of his
+Sovereign." {279b}  Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival,
+not very gay.
+
+He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson's (?)
+famous indictment of Elizabeth's Government, in Observations on a
+Libel. {280a}  What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was
+not solely devoted to Venus and Adonis and to furbishing-up old
+plays, though, no doubt, he MAY have unpacked his bosom in the
+Sonnets, and indulged his luscious imaginations in Venus and Adonis.
+I would not limit the potentialities of his genius.  But, certainly,
+this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to
+mention his severe "study and meditation" on science.
+
+All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do
+not exhaust his exercises.  Bacon, living laborious days, plunged
+into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth's
+disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship,
+and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to
+try to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex's
+affairs, to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge
+his suit for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of
+"Formularies and Elegancies" (January 1595), to write his Essays, to
+try for the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of
+the doomed Essex (1600-1), while always "labouring in secret" at that
+vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever
+preoccupied him, he says, and distracted his attention from his
+practice and from affairs of State. {281a}  Of these State affairs
+the projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous.  He was also
+writing The Advancement of Learning (1605).  "I do confess," he wrote
+to Sir Thomas Bodley, "since I was of any understanding, my mind hath
+in effect been absent from that I have done." {281b}  His mind was
+with his beloved Reformation of Learning:  this came between him and
+his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his
+private schemes and suits.  To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add
+the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare's company, and the
+inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.  Even without this
+considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but
+with it--he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him
+and his plot--to write plays under the pseudonym of "William
+Shakespeare."
+
+Talk of miracles as things which do not happen!  The activities of
+Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man's mind and heart,--
+especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his
+passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to
+me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold,
+he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older.  No
+wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and saw
+life en noir:  man delighted him not, nor woman either.
+
+The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of
+Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical
+impossibility.  But they make it an intellectual miracle.  Perhaps I
+may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent,
+Will Shakspere's knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. {282a}
+I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip
+of his pen.  Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and
+no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his
+legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon
+can have been capable of these mysterious productions.  (But why was
+Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)
+
+By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not
+Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of
+the Folio. {282b}  "If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote
+the plays, he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication
+of the Folio, and the style of it" (stuffed with terms of law) "would
+be accounted for."  Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote the
+Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature.
+"Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period," says Sir
+Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word "all." {283a}
+However he says, "We must admit that this use of legal jargon is
+frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan
+period--in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable."
+Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. {283b}  The lawyers all
+agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style "more natural,"
+and more accurately than the rest.  And yet I cannot even argue that,
+if he did use legal terms at all, he would be sure to do it pretty
+well.
+
+For on this point of Will's use of legal phraseology I frankly
+profess myself entirely at a loss.  To use it in poetry was part of
+the worse side of taste at that period.  The lawyers with one voice
+declare that Will's use of it is copious and correct, and that their
+"mystery" is difficult, their jargon hard to master; "there is
+nothing so dangerous," wrote Lord Campbell, "as for one not of the
+craft to tamper with our freemasonry."  I have not tampered with it.
+Perhaps a man of genius who found it interesting might have learned
+the technical terms more readily than lawyers deem possible.  But
+Will, so accurate in his legal terms, is so inaccurate on many other
+points; for example, in civil and natural history, and in classic
+lore.  Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally at sea as a naturalist.
+On the habits of bees, for example, "his natural history of the
+insect is as limited as it is inaccurate." {284a}  Virgil, though not
+a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will.  About
+the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed.  His Natural History was
+folklore, or was taken from that great mediaeval storehouse of
+absurdities, the popular work of Pliny.  "He went to contemporary
+error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to nature," says a
+critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. {284b}  Was that worthy of Bacon?
+
+All these charges against le vieux Williams (as Theophile Gautier
+calls our Will) I admit.  But Will was no Bacon; Will had not "taken
+all knowledge for his province."  Bacon, I hope, had not neglected
+Bees!  Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal
+terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity, in history, in
+classic matters, is not by me to be solved.  I can only surmise that
+from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason, he had read law-
+books, or drawn information from Templars about the meaning of their
+jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.
+
+
+We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian
+arguments against Will Shakespeare's authorship of the plays and
+poems.  Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut
+Franciscus, which, freely interpreted, means, "If Bacon is not the
+author, who the devil is?"
+
+We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are
+attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them,
+namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early
+years of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent
+place in the world of the drama.  His authorship is explicitly
+vouched for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he
+left bequests in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend,
+and always critic, Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and
+pamphleteer, who had been one of Henslowe's "hands," and lived into
+the Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from
+within, and HIS "mellifluous Shakespeare" is "Will," as his Beaumont
+was "Frank," his Marlowe "Kit," his Fletcher, "Jack."  The author of
+Daiphantus (1604), mentioning the popularity of Hamlet, styles it
+"one of friendly Shakespeare's tragedies."  Shakespeare, to him, was
+our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly character.  The other
+authors of allusions did not need to say WHO their "Shakespeare" was,
+any more than they needed to say WHO Marlowe or any other poet was.
+We have examined the possibly unprecedented argument which demands
+that they who mention Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would
+enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also the actor.
+
+"But all may have been deceived" by the long conspiracy of the astute
+Bacon, or the Nameless One.  To believe this possible, considering
+the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival
+playwrights, is to be credulous indeed.  The Baconians, representing
+Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as "the old hermit
+of Prague," destroy their own case.  A Will who had to make his mark,
+like his father, could not pose as an author even to the call-boy of
+his company.  Mr. Greenwood's bookless Will, with some crumbs of
+Latin, and some power of "bumbasting out a blank verse," is a rather
+less impossible pretender, indeed; but why and when did the speaker
+of patois, the bookless one, write blank verse, from 1592 onwards,
+and where are his blank verses?  Where are the "works" of Poet-Ape?
+As to the man, even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he
+was "a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very
+ready and pleasant, smooth wit."  To his fellow-actors he was "so
+worthy a friend and fellow" (associate).  To Jonson, "he was, indeed,
+honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy,
+brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely
+that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."  If Jonson
+here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that
+extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as
+remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is so
+characteristic of the style of Shakespeare's plays.  In this
+prodigality he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks;
+"panting Time toils after him in vain," and even the reader, much
+more the listener, might say, sufflaminandus est; "he needs to have
+the brake put on." {287a}
+
+Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will.  Only despair
+can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare,
+Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as "falling into those things which
+could not escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous."  But to this
+last poor shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and
+Baconians reduced.
+
+Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.
+
+But it is "impossible" that a man should have known so much,
+especially of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign
+manners and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five
+years at a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house
+of faculty, the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over
+the Armada.
+
+"With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles of
+printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and
+every study furnished," says a contemporary. {288a}  If a doubter
+will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a play in
+quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold for
+fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a lover
+of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible.  Such a man
+cannot be kept from books.
+
+If the reader will look into "the translations and imitations of the
+classics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love-
+pamphlets and plays of the University wits" (when these chanced to be
+printed), "the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste," {288b}
+he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of
+Shakespeare blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in "Adonis' garden."
+The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious,
+saturated with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta--a world
+of knowledge of a kind then "in widest commonalty spread," but now so
+much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore seems
+recondite learning.
+
+The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could
+get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to "dispute their way
+through Europe," made the Italian tour, and, notoriously, were
+"Italianate."  They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence,
+Venice, and Rome.  Actors visited Denmark and Germany.  No man at
+home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious
+Venetian "tranect or common ferry," the gondolas, and the Rialto.
+There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the foreign
+wars.  Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised by the ease
+with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can
+learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish.  That
+Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of
+Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of
+his works.  For courtly manners he had the literary convention and
+Lyly's Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and
+in the houses of the great.  As to untaught nobility of manners,
+there came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding
+village on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of
+exquisite grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her:
+of her manners and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her
+trial bears concordant evidence.  Other untaught gifts she possessed,
+and the historic record is unimpeached as regards that child of
+genius, Jeanne d'Arc.
+
+"Ne me dites jamais cette bete de mot, impossible," said Napoleon:
+it is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.
+
+If intellectual "miracles" were impossible to genius, even Bacon
+could not have been and done all that he was and did, and also the
+author of the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not have
+been the scholar that he was.  For the rest, I need not return on my
+tracks and explain once more such shallow mysteries as the "Silence
+of Philip Henslowe," and the lack of literary anecdotage about
+Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town.  Had Will, not
+Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough of
+the kind desired.
+
+"We have the epics of Homer," people say, "what matters it whether
+they be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business through
+seven centuries?  We have the plays of Shakespeare, what matters it
+whether he, or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?"
+
+It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries,
+such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give
+love and praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Achaean
+"Father of the rest"; and to "friendly Shakespeare."
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I:  "TROILUS AND CRESSIDA"
+
+
+
+To myself Troilus and Cressida is, with Henry VI, Part I, the most
+mysterious among the Shakespearean plays.  Here we find, if Will
+wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern
+world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient
+world; but the English author's eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust
+of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy.  The work of
+perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before our era,
+when, by the author of the Cypria, these favourite heroes of Homer,
+Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as scoundrels, assassins, and
+cowards.
+
+In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the
+writer is no scholar.  He makes the Achaean fleet muster in "the port
+of Athens," of all places.  Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-
+place, Aulis, in Boeotia.  (This Prologue is not in the Folio of
+1623.)  Six gates hath the Englishman's Troy, and the Scaean is not
+one of them.
+
+The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are
+from the mediaeval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer,
+whose Pandarus is only notable for loosing a traitor's shaft at
+Menelaus, in time of truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede.
+The play begins after the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and
+Menelaus:  in the play, not in Homer, Paris "retires hurt," as is at
+first reported.  Hector has a special grudge against the Telamonian
+Aias.  As in the Iliad there is a view of the Achaeans, taken from
+the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the play, Pandarus and Cressida
+review the Trojans re-entering the city.  Paris turns out not to be
+hurt after all.
+
+In Act i. Scene 3, the Achaeans hold council, and regret the
+disaffection of Achilles.  Here comes Ulysses' great speech on
+discipline, in armies, and in states, the gradations of rank and
+duty; commonly thought to be a leaf in Shakespeare's crown of bays.
+The speeches of Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet
+treats Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do.  But the
+poet represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at Patroclus's
+imitation of the cough and other infirmities of old Nestor, to which
+Homer, naturally, never alludes.  Throughout, the English poet
+regards Achilles with the eyes of his most infamous late Greek and
+ignorant mediaeval detractors.  The Homeric sequence of events is so
+far preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and
+Menelaus, comes (through AEneas) the challenge by Hector to fight any
+Greek in "gentle and joyous passage of arms" (Iliad, VII).  As in the
+Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by the
+contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on
+Aias.  In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as Porthos in
+Les Trois Mousquetaires.  The play makes him as great an eater of
+beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  Achilles, save in a
+passage quite out of accord with the rest of the piece, is nearly as
+dull as Aias, is discourteous, and is cowardly!  No poet and no
+scholar who knew Homer's heroes in Homer's Greek, could thus degrade
+them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites are loathsome in
+their profusion of filthy thoughts.  It does not follow that Will did
+not write the part of Thersites.  Some of the most beautiful and
+Shakespearean pieces of verse adorn the play; one would say that no
+man but Will could have written them.  Troilus and Cressida, at
+first, appear "to dally with the innocence of love"; and nothing can
+be nobler and more dramatic than the lines in which Cressida,
+compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek camp, in
+exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.  But the Homeric
+and the alien later elements,--the story of false love,--cannot be
+successfully combined.  The poet, whoever he was, appears to weary
+and to break down.  He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the
+death of Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while resting
+unarmed, without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of
+sumptuous mail from a nameless runaway.  In the play he has slain
+Patroclus, but has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which,
+in Homer, he is wearing.  Achilles then meets Hector, but far from
+rushing to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters
+his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless Hector.
+
+Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a
+day becomes "the sluttish spoil of opportunity," and of Diomede, and
+the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a
+squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o'
+love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector.
+Yet there seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and broken
+lights from the splendour of Homer.  When Achilles eyes Hector all
+over, during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking in
+what part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of
+Iliad, XXII, 320-326, where Achilles searches his own armour, worn by
+Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn by Hector, for a
+chink in the mail.  Yet, after all, these points are taken, not from
+the Iliad, but from Caxton's popular Troy Book.
+
+Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men to
+
+
+   "cry amain,
+Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,"
+
+
+we think of Iliad, XXII, 390-393, where Achilles commands the
+Myrmidons to go singing the paean
+
+
+"Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!"
+
+
+The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls
+his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus.  But, in fact,
+this passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from
+Caxton, except as regards the paean.
+
+It may be worth noting that Chapman's first instalment of his
+translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and VII-XI,
+appeared in 1598, and thence the author could adapt the passages from
+Iliad, Book VII.  In or about 1598-9 occurred, in Histriomastix, by
+Marston and others, a burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing
+Cressida, speaks of "thy knight," who "SHAKES his furious SPEARE,"
+while in April 1599, Henslowe's account-book contains entries of
+money paid to Dekker and Chettle for a play on Troilus and Cressida,
+for the Earl of Nottingham's Company. {297a}  Of this play no more is
+known, nor can we be sure that Chapman's seven Books of the Iliad (I,
+II, VII-XI) of 1598 attracted the attention of playwrights, from
+Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to Trojan affairs.  The
+coincidences at least are curious.  If "SHAKES his furious SPEARE" in
+Histriomastix refers to Shakespeare in connection with Cressida,
+while, in 1599, Dekker and Chettle were doing a Troilus and Cressida
+for a company not Shakespeare's, then there were TWO Troilus and
+Cressida in the field.  A licence to print a Troilus and Cressida was
+obtained in 1602-3, but the quarto of our play, the Shakespearean
+play, is of 1609, "as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain's men," that
+is, by Shakespeare's Company.  Now Dekker and Chettle wrote,
+apparently, for Lord Nottingham's Company.  One quarto of 1609
+declares, in a Preface, that the play has "never been staled with the
+stage"; another edition of the same year, from the same publishers,
+has not the Preface, but declares that the piece "was acted by the
+King's Majesty's servants AT THE GLOBE." {298a}  The author of the
+Preface (Ben Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, {298b}) speaks only of a
+single author, who has written other admirable comedies.  "When he is
+gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and
+set up a new English Inquisition."  Why?  The whole affair is a
+puzzle.  But if the author of the Preface is right about the single
+author of Troilus and Cressida, and if Shakespeare is alluded to in
+connection with Cressida, in Histriomastix (1599), then it appears to
+me that Shakespeare, in 1598-9, after Chapman's portion of the Iliad
+appeared, was author of one Troilus and Cressida, extant in 1602-3
+(when its publication was barred till the publisher "got authority"),
+while Chettle and Dekker, in April 1599, were busy with another
+Troilus and Cressida, as why should they not be?  In an age so lax
+about copyright, if their play was of their own original making, are
+we to suppose that there was copyright in the names of the leading
+persons of the piece, Troilus and Cressida?
+
+Perhaps not:  but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge Stotsenburg's
+opinion {298c} that Henslowe's entries of April 1599 "refute the
+Shakespearean claim to the authorship of Troilus and Cressida," which
+exhibits "the collaboration of two men," as "leading commentators"
+hold that it does.  But the learned Judge mentions as a conceivable
+alternative that "there were two plays on the subject with the same
+name," and, really, it looks as if there were!  The Judge does not
+agree "with Webb and other gifted writers that Bacon wrote this
+play."  So far the Court is quite with him.  He goes on however, "It
+was, in my opinion, based on the foregoing facts, originally the
+production of Dekker and Chettle, added to and philosophically
+dressed by Francis Bacon."  But, according to Mr. Greenwood, "it is
+admitted not only that the different writing of two authors is
+apparent in the Folio play, but also that 'Shakespeare' must have had
+at least some share in a play of Troilus and Cressida as early as the
+very year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker and Chettle are found
+engaged in writing their play of that name," on the evidence of
+Histriomastix. {299a}  How that evidence proves that "a play of
+Troilus and Cressida had been PUBLISHED as by 'Shakespeare' about
+1599," I know not.  Perhaps "published" means "acted"?  "And it is
+not unreasonable to suppose that this play" ("published as by
+Shakespeare") "was the one to which Henslowe alludes"--as being
+written in April 1599, by Dekker and Chettle.
+
+If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker,
+Chettle, and "Shakespeare," the Great Unknown, or Bacon.  He
+collaborates with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham's
+men (according to Sir Sidney Lee), {300a} but it is, later at least,
+played by Shakespeare's company; and perhaps Bacon gets none of the 4
+pounds paid {300b} to Dekker and Chettle.  Henslowe does not record
+his sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to Shakespeare's or to any
+company or purchaser.  Without an entry of the careful Henslowe
+recording his receipts for the sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to
+any purchaser, it is not easy to see how Shakespeare's company
+procured the manuscript, and thus enabled him to refashion it.
+Perhaps no reader will fail to recognise his hand in the beautiful
+blank verse of many passages.  I am not familiar enough with the
+works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable
+passages.  Thersites is beastly:  a Yahoo of Swift's might poison
+with such phrases as his the name and nature of love, loyalty, and
+military courage.  But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly,
+and if he were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he
+may have written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim
+of "a daughter of the game," and the knightly Hector is butchered to
+sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles.  If Shakespeare read the
+books translated by Chapman, he must have read them in the same
+spirit as Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry of the
+Achaean could not be combined with the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman
+perversions, as he knew them in the mediaeval books of Troy, in the
+English of Lydgate and Caxton.  The chivalrous example of Chaucer he
+did not follow.  Probably Will looked on the play as one of his
+failures.  The Editor, if we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio
+clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly that it is not paged,
+and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.
+
+"The Grand Possessors" of the play referred to in the Preface to one
+of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare's
+Company.  In this case the owners would not permit the publication of
+the play if they could prevent it.  The title provokes Mr. Greenwood
+to say, "Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent;
+indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous." {301a}  Of
+course, if the players were the possessors, "grand" is merely a jeer,
+by a person advertising a successful piracy.  And in regard to
+Tieck's conjecture that James I is alluded to as "the grand
+possessor, for whom the play was expressly written," {301b} the
+autocratic James was very capable of protecting himself against
+larcenous publishers.
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II--CHETTLE'S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE
+
+
+
+In discussing contemporary allusions to William Shakspere or
+Shakespeare (or however you spell the name), I have not relied on
+Chettle's remarks (in Kind-Hart's Dreame, 1592) concerning Greene's
+Groatsworth of Wit.  Chettle speaks of it, saying, "in which a
+letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two
+of them taken."  It appears that by "one or two" Chettle means TWO.
+"With NEITHER of them that take offence was I acquainted" (at the
+time when he edited the Groatsworth), "and with one of them I care
+not if I never be."  We do not know who "the Gentlemen his Quondam
+acquaintance," addressed by Greene, were.  They are usually supposed
+to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, or Nash.  We do not know
+which of the two who take offence is the man with whom Chettle did
+not care to be acquainted.  Of "the other," according to Chettle,
+"myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he is excellent in
+the quality he professes" (that is, "in his profession," as we say),
+"besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing,
+which argues his honesty; and his facetious grace in writing that
+approves his art."
+
+Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the person of
+whom he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and (APPARENTLY) that he is
+"excellent in the quality he professes"--in his profession.  Speaking
+on the evidence of "divers of worship," the same man is said to
+possess "facetious grace in writing."  Had his writings been then
+published, Chettle, a bookish man, would have read them and formed
+his own opinion.  Works of Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe had been
+published.  Writing is NOT "the quality he professes," is not the
+"profession" of the man to whom Chettle refers.  On the other hand,
+the profession of Greene's "Quondam acquaintance" WAS writing, "they
+spend their wits in making Plays."  Thus the man who wrote, but whose
+profession was not that of writing, does not, so far, appear to have
+been one of those addressed by Greene.  It seems undeniable that
+Greene addresses gentlemen who are "playmakers," who "spend their
+wits in making Plays," and who are NOT actors; for Greene's purpose
+is to warn them against the rich, ungrateful actors.  If Greene's
+friends, at the moment when he wrote, were, or if any one of them
+then was, by profession an actor, Greene's warning to him against
+actors, directed to an actor, is not, to me, intelligible.  But Mr.
+Greenwood writes, "As I have shown, George Peele was one of the
+playwrights addressed by Greene, and Peele was a successful player as
+well as playwright, and might quite truly have been alluded to both
+as having 'facetious grace in writing,' and being 'excellent in the
+quality he professed,' that is, as a professional actor." {304a}
+
+I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of Oxford, had
+ever been a player, and a successful player.  But one may ask,--in
+1592 did George Peele "profess the quality" of an actor; was he then
+a professional actor, and only an occasional playwright?  If so, I am
+not apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not to put faith
+in the members of his own profession.  From them, as a successful
+member of their profession (a profession which, as Greene complains,
+"exploited" dramatic authors), Peele stood in no danger.  Thus I do
+not see how Chettle's professional actor, reported to have facetious
+grace in writing, can be identified with Peele.  The identification
+seems to me impossible.  Peele and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary
+gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering, though a literary man;
+he had not yet become a physician.  In 1592, none of the three had
+any profession but that of literature, so far as I am aware.  The man
+who had a special profession, and also wrote, was not one of these
+three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere literary gentleman, pamphleteer
+and playwright.
+
+I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene
+addressed the Groatsworth, though the atheistic writer of tragedies
+seems meant, and disgracefully meant, for Marlowe.  I only know that
+Chettle is expressing his regrets for Greene's language to some one
+whom he applauded as to his exercise of his profession; and who,
+according to "divers of worship," had also "facetious grace in
+writing."  "Myself have seen him no less civil than he is excellent
+in the quality he professes"; whether or not this means that Chettle
+has SEEN his excellence in his profession, I cannot tell for certain;
+but Chettle's remark is, at least, contrasted with what he gives
+merely from report--"the facetious grace in writing" of the man in
+question.  HIS writing is not part of his profession, so he is not,
+in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge, Peele, Marlowe, or Nash.
+
+Who, then, is this mysterious personage?  Malone, Dyce, Steevens,
+Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse
+and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere.
+But Mr. Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose "mind" is "legal," have pointed
+out that this weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere, if
+Greene meant Shakspere), attacked by Greene.  For Chettle says that
+in the Groatsworth of Wit "a letter, written to divers play-makers,
+is offensively by one or two of them taken."  The mysterious one is,
+therefore, one of the playwrights addressed by Greene.  Consequently
+all the followers of Malone, who wrote before Messrs. Fleay and
+Castle, are mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to say about Sir
+Sidney Lee, J. C. Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr. Gosse, in the way
+of moral reprobation, may be read by the curious in his pages. {305a}
+
+Meanwhile, if we take Chettle to have been a strict grammarian, by
+his words--"a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively
+by one or two of them taken," Will is excluded; the letter was most
+assuredly not written to HIM.  But I, whose mind is not legal, am not
+certain that Chettle does not mean that the letter, written to divers
+play-makers, was by one or two makers of plays offensively taken.
+
+This opinion seems the less improbable, as the person to whom Chettle
+is most apologetic excels in a quality or profession, which is
+contrasted with, and is not identical with, "his facetious grace in
+writing"--a parergon, or " bye-work," in his case.  Whoever this
+person was, he certainly was not Marlowe, Peele, Lodge, or Nash.  We
+must look for some other person who had a profession, and also was
+reported to have facetious grace in writing.
+
+If Chettle is to be held tight to grammar, Greene referred to some
+one unknown, some one who wrote for the stage, but had another
+profession.  If Chettle is not to be thus tautly construed, I confess
+that to myself he seems to have had Shakspere, even Will, in his
+mind.  For Will in 1592 had "a quality which he professed," that of
+an actor; and also (I conceive) was reported to have " facetious
+grace in writing."  But other gentlemen may have combined these
+attributes; wherefore I lay no stress on the statements of Chettle,
+as if they referred to our Will Shakspere.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{0a}  E. J. Castle, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Greene, pp. 194-
+195.
+
+{0b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 145.
+
+{0c}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 340.
+
+{0d}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 340, 341.
+
+{0e}  In Re Shakespeare, p. 54.
+
+{0f}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 341.
+
+{0g}  Ibid., p. 470.
+
+{0h}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 339.
+
+{0i}  The Vindicators of Shakespeare, pp. 115-116.
+
+{0j}  Ibid., p. 49.
+
+{0k}  The Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 14.
+
+{4a}  Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare.  By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.
+
+{7a}  The Shakespere Problem Restated, p. 293.
+
+{11a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 31-37.
+
+{13a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 36-37.
+
+{16a}  Tue Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 20.
+
+{17a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 47-48.
+
+{17b}  Ibid., pp. 54-55.
+
+{17c}  Ibid., p. 54.
+
+{17d}  Ibid., p. 56.
+
+{17e}  Ibid., p. 59.
+
+{17f}  Ibid., p. 62.
+
+{17g}  Ibid., p. 193.
+
+{18a}  See his Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 210.
+
+{19a}  Vindicators, p. 187.
+
+{19b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 223.
+
+{21a}  In Re Shakespeare, p. 54.
+
+{22a}  In a brief note of two pages (Cornhill Magazine, November
+1911) he makes such reply as the space permits to a paper of my own,
+"Shakespeare or X?" in the September number.  With my goodwill he
+might have written thirty-two pages to my sixteen, but I am not the
+Editor, and never heard of Mr. Greenwood's note till May 1912.
+
+He says that I had represented him as stating that the Unknown genius
+adopted the name of William Shake-speare or Shakespeare as a good nom
+de guerre, without any reference to the fact that there was an actor
+in existence of the name of William Shakspere, whose name was
+sometimes written Shakespeare, and without the least idea that the
+works he published under this pseudonym would be fathered upon the
+actor . . . " (My meaning has obviously been too obscurely stated by
+me.)
+
+Mr. Greenwood next writes that the confusion between the actor, and
+the unknown taking the name William Shakespeare, "did happen and was
+intended to happen."
+
+C'est la le miracle!
+
+How could it happen if the actor were the bookless, ignorant man whom
+Mr. Greenwood describes?  It could not happen:  Will must have been
+unmasked in a day.  The fact that a strange plot existed was only too
+obvious.  The Unknown's secret must have been tracked by the hounds
+of keenest nose in the packs of rival and jealous authors and of
+actors.  None gives tongue.
+
+{27a}  Francis Bacon Wrote Shakespeare, p. 37.
+
+{30a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 333.
+
+{31a}  In the passage which I quoted, with notes of omission, from
+Mr. Greenwood (p. 333), he went on to say that the eulogies of the
+poet by "some cultured critics of that day," "afford no proof that
+the author who published under the name of Shakespeare was in reality
+Shakspere the Stratford player."  That position I later contest.
+
+{31b}  See chap. XI, The First Folio.
+
+{33a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 305, 306.
+
+{34a}  Furness, Merchant of Venice, pp. 271, 272.
+
+{34b}  On this see Mr. Pollard's Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, pp.
+1-9.
+
+{37a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 202, 348, 349.
+
+{38a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 349.
+
+{44a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 356.
+
+{45a}  In Re Shakespeare, p. 88, note I.
+
+{48a}  Studies in Shakespeare, p. 15; Life of Shakespeare, by Malone,
+pp. 561-2, 564; Appendix, XI, xvi.
+
+{50a}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp.
+97, 98.
+
+{51a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 44.
+
+{52a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 39.
+
+{52b}  Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 210.
+
+{53a}  Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 187.
+
+{53b}  Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 223.
+
+{55a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 69.
+
+{56a}  See chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.
+
+{56b}  See C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends,
+pp. 48, 343-8.
+
+{57a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 207-9.
+
+{59a}  Chapter X, infra.
+
+{62a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 96.
+
+{62b}  See chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.
+
+{62c}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 94-96.
+
+{64a}  Shakespeare, pp. 38-40.
+
+{65a}  Raleigh, Shakespeare, pp. 77, 78.
+
+{69a}  So he seems to me to do; but in Vindicators of Shakespeare, p.
+135, he shows great caution:  "I refer the reader to Mr. Collin's
+essay, and ask him to judge for himself."
+
+{71a}  Studies in Shakespeare, p. 15.
+
+{72a}  Studies in Shakespeare, p. 21.
+
+{75a}  Alcibiades, I, pp. 132, 133; Troilus, III, scene 3.
+
+{77a}  Studies in Shakespeare, p. 46.
+
+{77b}  Iliad, p. 63.
+
+{91a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 54, 55.
+
+{93a}  National Review, vol. xxxix., 1902.
+
+{93b}  The Pilot, Aug. 30, 1902, p. 220.
+
+{96a}  The oldest mention of a CIRCULATING library known to me is in
+Hull, in 1650, when Sir James Turner found it excellent.
+
+{97a}  In his Shakespeare (English Men of Letters), pp. 66, 67.
+
+{97b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 77, 78.
+
+{97c}  The Shakespearean Myth, p. 162.
+
+{100a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 76.
+
+{101a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 81, note I.
+
+{103a}  Penzance, The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, pp. 150, 151.
+Citing Appleton Morgan's Shakespearean Myth, pp. 248, 298.
+
+{106a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 175.
+
+{107a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 457.
+
+{109a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 58.
+
+{109b}  Apology the Actors, 1612.
+
+{110a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 267.
+
+{111a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 267, 268.
+
+{112a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 50-52.
+
+{113a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 51.
+
+{113b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 51.
+
+{113c}  Ibid., p. 500, citing Mr. Reed's Francis Bacon our Shake-
+speare, chap. ii. pp. 62, 63.
+
+{113d}  Ibid., pp. 500-520, chap xvi.
+
+{114a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 512.
+
+{114b}  Ibid., p. 514.
+
+{114c}  Ibid., p. 386, note I.
+
+{114d}  Ibid., p. 93.
+
+{120a}  Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v. p. 126.
+Prof. G. P. Baker.
+
+{121a}  Furness, Love's Labour's Lost, pp. xiii., 348-350:  cf. pp.
+348, 349, for the four distinct styles of linguistic affectation of
+the period, at least as they are represented in literature.
+
+{121b}  Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light, Appendix on Marlowe.
+
+{124a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 516.
+
+{126a}  Act i.  Scene 2.  Furness, Love's Labour's Lost, p. 45, note.
+
+{127a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 67, 68.
+
+{129a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 66.
+
+{129b}  Ibid., p. 67.
+
+{136a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 307.
+
+{138a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 308.
+
+{140a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 309.
+
+{141a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 310.
+
+{141b}  Ibid., pp. 310, 311.
+
+{141c}  Ibid., p. 311.
+
+{142a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 309.
+
+{142b}  Ibid., pp. 311, 312.
+
+{143a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 312, 313.
+
+{145a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 313.
+
+{146a}  See Appendix II, "Chettle's supposed allusion to Will
+Shakspere."
+
+{147a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 330.
+
+{149a}  The Vindicators of Shakespeare, pp. 115, 116, 211.  See my
+Introduction, p. xxii.
+
+{150a}  The Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 210.
+
+{150b}  Ibid., p. 136.
+
+{151a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 338.
+
+{155a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 346.
+
+{157a}  Cited in The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 353.
+
+{159a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 353.
+
+{159b}  Diary, pp. xxvii, xxviii.
+
+{160a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 367.
+
+{160b}  Ibid., pp. 368, 369.
+
+{161a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 354.
+
+{163a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 366.
+
+{164a}  Some Baconians say so!
+
+{171a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 181, 397.
+
+{171b}  Ibid., p. 186.
+
+{174a}  Some verses of Fletcher's may, perhaps, refer to Beaumont's
+death.
+
+{175a}  C. I. Elton, Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp. 246,
+247.
+
+{175b}  As to the Aldine Ovid in the Bodleian, see Mr. Greenwood in
+The Vindicators of Shakespeare, pp. 191, 192.  Of course he raises
+every objection, but I do not feel sure that either an affirmative or
+negative result can be attained by EXPERTISE.  We are not told when
+or where the Bodleian obtained the book; nor what is the date of the
+handwriting of the inscription about W. Hall, a personage whom we are
+to meet later.  A good deal of business is done in forging names in
+books.
+
+{176a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 196.
+
+{176b}  Ibid., p. 197.
+
+{177a}  See Frontispiece,
+
+{179a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 247, 248, note I.
+
+{180a}  National Review, June 1912, p. 903.
+
+{180b}  Pall Mall Gazette, November 1910.
+
+{181a}  Outlines, vol. i. p. 283.
+
+{182a}  P. 73, 1806.
+
+{183a}  Outlines, vol. i. p. 283.
+
+{183b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 247.
+
+{186a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 248-249.
+
+{186b}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp.
+236-237.
+
+{187a}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, p.
+228.
+
+{187b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199.
+
+{187c}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp.
+332-333.
+
+{187d}  Ibid., p. 250.
+
+{188a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199, note 1.
+
+{189a}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp.
+339, 342.
+
+{190a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 238.
+
+{198a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214.
+
+{200a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214, note 2.
+
+{201a}  C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, p.
+56.
+
+{201b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 28, 29.
+
+{207a}  Like Mr. Greenwood, I think that Ben was the penman.
+
+{208a}  Pollard, ut supra, p. 10.
+
+{210a}  Pollard, ut supra, pp. 64-80.
+
+{215a}  Pollard, ut supra, pp. 121-124.
+
+{216a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 287-288.
+
+{217a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 290-291.
+
+{217b}  Ibid., pp. 292, 293.
+
+{218a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
+
+{219a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 489, 490.
+
+{219b}  Ibid., p. 491.
+
+{219c}  Studies in Shakespeare, p. 352.
+
+{220a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
+
+{220b}  Ibid., p. 491.
+
+{220c}  Ibid., p. 293.
+
+{220d}  Ibid., p. 293.
+
+{221a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 297.
+
+{221b}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 297.
+
+{222a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
+
+{222b}  Ibid., p. 351.
+
+{222c}  Ibid., p. 351.
+
+{222d}  Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
+
+{222e}  Ibid., pp. 351, 358.
+
+{223a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 351.
+
+{223b}  Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
+
+{223c}  Ibid., p. 351.
+
+{223d}  Ibid., p. 351.
+
+{223e}  Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
+
+{223f}  Ibid., p. 290.
+
+{223g}  Ibid., pp. 290, 291.
+
+{223h}  Ibid., p. 293.
+
+{224a} The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 351.
+
+{224b}  Ibid., p. 358.
+
+{224c}  Ibid., pp. 351, 358.
+
+{224d}  Ibid., p. 290.
+
+{224e}  Ibid., p. 293.
+
+{225a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 355, 356.
+
+{226a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 355, 356.
+
+{226b}  Ibid., pp. 158, 160, 162 ("not the original author"), 170.
+
+{226c}  Ibid., pp. 130-151, 160, 168.
+
+{226d}  Ibid., p., 123, note 2.
+
+{227a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 356.
+
+{228a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 160.
+
+{228b}  Ibid., p. 356.
+
+{228c}  Ibid., p. 160.
+
+{228d}  Ibid., p. 356.
+
+{228e}  Ibid., pp. 290, 293.
+
+{228f}  Ibid., p. 358.
+
+{229a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 365.  I will bet Mr.
+Greenwood any sum not exceeding half a crown that he cannot find any
+"records of the writing of" either of these plays in Henslowe's
+"Diary,"--his account book of expenses and receipts.
+
+{229b}  Ibid., p. 365.
+
+{229c}  Ibid., p. 365.
+
+{229d}  Ibid., p. 160.
+
+{231a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 276.
+
+{231b}  Ibid., p. 290.
+
+{232a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 293.
+
+{232b}  Ibid., p. 294.
+
+{233a}  The Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 57 (1911).
+
+{237a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 453.
+
+{244a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 466.
+
+{245a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 313.
+
+{245b}  Supra, p. 143.
+
+{245c}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 466.
+
+{249a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 482.
+
+{250a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 467, 471.
+
+{250b}  See chapter IX on The Later Life of Shakespeare.
+
+{250c}  Ibid., pp. 472, 474.
+
+{251a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 473.
+
+{251b}  Ibid., p. 474.
+
+{253a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 475.
+
+{254a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 106.
+
+{255a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 478.
+
+{258a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 480.
+
+{259a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
+
+{260a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
+
+{260b}  Ibid., pp. 489-490.
+
+{260c}  See chapter XI, The First Folio.
+
+{261a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.
+
+{261b}  Ibid., pp. 489-491.
+
+{262a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 486.
+
+{264a} The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 488.
+
+{266a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 491.
+
+{267a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 295, cf. p. 499.
+
+{268a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 295, 499.
+
+{270a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 499.
+
+{274a}  Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 4 (1861).
+
+{275a}  Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 31.
+
+{275b}  Ibid., vol. i. pp. 74-95.
+
+{276a}  Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. pp. 108-109.
+
+{279a}  Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 106.
+
+{279b}  Ibid., vol. i. pp. 121-143.
+
+{280a}  Sixty pages in Spedding's Letters and Life of Francis Bacon,
+vol. i. pp. 146-208.
+
+{281a}  See his statement (1603), Spedding, iii. pp. 84-87.
+
+{281b}  Ibid., iii. p. 253.
+
+{282a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 371-406.
+
+{282b}  The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, p. 198.
+
+{283a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 391.
+
+{283b}  Ibid., pp. 408-410.
+
+{284a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 425.
+
+{284b}  Ibid., p. 431.
+
+{287a}  Sufflamen is the "drag" or "brake."  Ben's, "it was necessary
+he should be STOPPED," is an incorrect translation.
+
+{288a}  Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, p. 65.
+
+{288b}  Ibid., p. 65.
+
+{297a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 358-362.
+
+{298a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 491-494.
+
+{298b}  Ibid., p. 495.
+
+{298c}  Ibid., pp. 358-360.
+
+{299a} The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 361.
+
+{300a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 360.
+
+{300b}  Ibid., p. 358.
+
+{301a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 495, note I.
+
+{301b}  Ibid., p. 494.
+
+{304a}  Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 69.
+
+{305a}  The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 317-319.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SHAKESPEARE, BACON ETC. ***
+
+This file should be named sbun10.txt or sbun10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, sbun11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sbun10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/sbun10.zip b/old/sbun10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0571da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sbun10.zip
diff --git a/old/sbun10h.htm b/old/sbun10h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..00e5e2d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sbun10h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,8289 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">
+<title>Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown</title>
+</head>
+<body>
+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, by Andrew Lang</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+by Andrew Lang
+(#36 in our series by Andrew Lang)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: February, 2004  [EBook #5127]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 5, 2002]
+[Most recently updated: May 5, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1912 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+INTRODUCTION<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The theory that Francis Bacon was, in the main, the author of &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+plays,&rdquo; has now been for fifty years before the learned world.&nbsp;
+Its advocates have met with less support than they had reason to expect.&nbsp;
+Their methods, their logic, and their hypotheses closely resemble those
+applied by many British and foreign scholars to Homer; and by critics
+of the very Highest School to Holy Writ.&nbsp; Yet the Baconian theory
+is universally rejected in England by the professors and historians
+of English literature; and generally by students who have no profession
+save that of Letters.&nbsp; The Baconians, however, do not lack the
+countenance and assistance of highly distinguished persons, whose names
+are famous where those of mere men of letters are unknown; and in circles
+where the title of &ldquo;Professor&rdquo; is not duly respected.<br>
+<br>
+The partisans of Bacon aver (or one of them avers) that &ldquo;Lord
+Penzance, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Palmerston, Judge Webb, Judge Holmes
+(of Kentucky, U.S.), Prince Bismarck, John Bright, and innumerable most
+<i>thoughtful scholars eminent in many walks of life</i>,<i> and especially
+in the legal profession </i>. . . &rdquo; have been Baconians, or, at
+least, opposed to Will Shakspere&rsquo;s authorship.&nbsp; To these
+names of scholars I must add that of my late friend, Samuel Clemens,
+D.Litt. of Oxford; better known to many as Mark Twain.&nbsp; Dr. Clemens
+was, indeed, no mean literary critic; witness his epoch-making study
+of Prof. Dowden&rsquo;s <i>Life of Shelley</i>,<i> </i>while his researches
+into the biography of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc were most conscientious.<br>
+<br>
+With the deepest respect for the political wisdom and literary taste
+of Lord Palmerston, Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and the late
+Mr. John Bright; and with every desire to humble myself before the judicial
+verdicts of Judges Holmes, Webb, and Lord Penzance; with sincere admiration
+of my late friend, Dr. Clemens, I cannot regard them as, in the first
+place and professionally, trained students of literary history.<br>
+<br>
+They were no more specially trained students of Elizabethan literature
+than myself; they were amateurs in this province, as I am an amateur,
+who differ from all of them in opinion.&nbsp; Difference of opinion
+concerning points of literary history ought not to make &ldquo;our angry
+passions rise.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet this controversy has been extremely
+bitter.<br>
+<br>
+I abstain from quoting the &ldquo;sweetmeats,&rdquo; in Captain MacTurk&rsquo;s
+phrase, which have been exchanged by the combatants.&nbsp; Charges of
+ignorance and monomania have been answered by charges of forgery, lying,
+&ldquo;scandalous literary dishonesty,&rdquo; and even inaccuracy.&nbsp;
+Now no mortal is infallibly accurate, but we are all sane and &ldquo;indifferent
+honest.&rdquo;&nbsp; There have been forgeries in matters Shakespearean,
+alas, but not in connection with the Baconian controversy.<br>
+<br>
+It is an argument of the Baconians, and generally of the impugners of
+good Will&rsquo;s authorship of the plays vulgarly attributed to him,
+that the advocates of William Shakspere, Gent, as author of the plays,
+differ like the Kilkenny cats among themselves on many points.&nbsp;
+All do not believe, with Mr. J. C. Collins, that Will knew Sophocles,
+Euripides, and &AElig;schylus (but not Aristophanes) as well as Mr.
+Swinburne did, or knew them at all - for that matter.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard
+differs very widely from Sir Sidney Lee on points concerning the First
+Folio and the Quartos: my sympathies are with Mr. Pollard.&nbsp; Few,
+if any, partisans of Will agree with Mrs. Stopes (herself no Baconian)
+about the history of the Stratford monument of the poet.&nbsp; About
+Will&rsquo;s authorship of <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Henry
+VI</i>,<i> </i>Part I, the friends of Will, like the friends of Bacon,
+are at odds among themselves.&nbsp; These and other divergencies of
+opinion cause the Baconians to laugh, as if <i>they </i>were a harmonious
+circle . . . !&nbsp; For the Baconian camp is not less divided against
+itself than the camp of the &ldquo;Stratfordians.&rdquo;&nbsp; Not all
+Baconians hold that Bacon was the legitimate son of &ldquo;that Imperial
+votaress&rdquo; Queen Elizabeth.&nbsp; Not all believe in the Cryptogram
+of Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, or in any other cryptograms.&nbsp; Not all
+maintain that Bacon, in the Sonnets, was inspired by a passion for the
+Earl of Essex, for Queen Elizabeth, or for an early miniature of himself.&nbsp;
+Not all regard him as the author of the plays of Kit Marlowe.&nbsp;
+Not all suppose him to be a Rosicrucian, who possibly died at the age
+of a hundred and six, or, perhaps, may be &ldquo;still running.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Not all aver that he wrote thirteen plays before 1593.&nbsp; But one
+party holds that, in the main, Will was the author of the plays, while
+the other party votes for Bacon - or for Bungay, a Great Unknown.&nbsp;
+I use Bungay as an endearing term for the mysterious being who was the
+Author if Francis Bacon was not.&nbsp; Friar Bungay was the rival of
+Friar Bacon, as the Unknown (if he was not Francis Bacon) is the rival
+of &ldquo;the inventor of Inductive reasoning.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I could never have expected that I should take a part in this controversy;
+but acquaintance with <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated </i>(503 pp.),
+(1908), and later works of Mr. G. G. Greenwood, M.P., has tempted me
+to enter the lists.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood is worth fighting; he is cunning of fence, is learned
+(and I cannot conceal my opinion that Mr. Donnelly and Judge Holmes
+were rather ignorant).&nbsp; He is not over &ldquo;the threshold of
+Eld&rdquo; (as were Judge Webb and Lord Penzance when they took up Shakespearean
+criticism).&nbsp; His knowledge of Elizabethan literature is vastly
+superior to mine, for I speak merely, in Matthew Arnold&rsquo;s words,
+as &ldquo;a belletristic trifler.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Moreover, Mr. Greenwood, as a practising barrister, is a judge of legal
+evidence; and, being a man of sense, does not &ldquo;hold a brief for
+Bacon&rdquo; as the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems, and
+does not value Baconian cryptograms.&nbsp; In the following chapters
+I make endeavours, conscientious if fallible, to state the theory of
+Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; It is a negative theory.&nbsp; He denies that Will
+Shakspere (or Shaxbere, or Shagspur, and so on) was the author of the
+plays and poems.&nbsp; Some other party was, <i>in the main</i>,<i>
+</i>with other hands, the author.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood cannot, or does
+not, offer a guess as to who this ingenious Somebody was.&nbsp; He does
+not affirm, and he does not deny, that Bacon had a share, greater or
+less, in the undertaking.<br>
+<br>
+In my brief tractate I have not room to consider every argument; to
+traverse every field.&nbsp; In philology I am all unlearned, and cannot
+pretend to discuss the language of Shakespeare, any more than I can
+analyse the language of Homer into proto-Arcadian and Cyprian, and so
+on.&nbsp; Again, I cannot pretend to have an opinion, based on internal
+evidence, about the genuine Shakespearean character of such plays as
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part I, and <i>Troilus
+and Cressida</i>.&nbsp; About them different views are held <i>within
+</i>both camps.<br>
+<br>
+I am no lawyer or naturalist (as Partridge said, <i>Non omnia possumus
+omnes</i>),<i> </i>and cannot imagine why our Author is so accurate
+in his frequent use of terms of law - if he be Will; and so totally
+at sea in natural history - if he be Francis, who &ldquo;took all knowledge
+for his province.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+How can a layman pretend to deal with Shakespeare&rsquo;s legal attainments,
+after he has read the work of the learned Recorder of Bristol, Mr. Castle,
+K.C.?&nbsp; To his legal mind it seems that in some of Will&rsquo;s
+plays he had the aid of an expert in law, and then his technicalities
+were correct.&nbsp; In other plays he had no such tutor, and then he
+was sadly to seek in his legal jargon.&nbsp; I understand Mr. Greenwood
+to disagree on this point.&nbsp; Mr. Castle says, &ldquo;I think Shakespeare
+would have had no difficulty in getting aid from several sources.&nbsp;
+There is therefore no <i>prima facie </i>reason why we should suppose
+the information was supplied by Bacon.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Of course there is not!<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In fact, there are some reasons why one should attribute the
+legal assistance, say, to Coke, rather than to Bacon.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The truth is, that Bacon seems not to have been lawyer enough for Will&rsquo;s
+purposes.&nbsp; &ldquo;We have no reason to believe that Bacon was particularly
+well read in the technicalities of our law; he never seems to have seriously
+followed his profession.&rdquo; <a name="citation0a"></a><a href="#footnote0a">{0a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Now we have Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s testimonial in favour of Mr. Castle,
+&ldquo;Who really does know something about law.&rdquo; <a name="citation0b"></a><a href="#footnote0b">{0b}</a>&nbsp;
+Mr. Castle thinks that Bacon really did not know enough about law, and
+suggests Sir Edward Coke, of all human beings, as conceivably Will&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;coach&rdquo; on legal technicalities.&nbsp; Perhaps Will consulted
+the Archbishop of Canterbury on theological niceties?<br>
+<br>
+<i>Que s&ccedil;ais je</i>?<i>&nbsp; </i>In some plays, says Mr. Castle,
+Will&rsquo;s law is all right, in other plays it is all wrong.&nbsp;
+As to Will&rsquo;s law, when Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Castle differ, a
+layman dare not intervene.<br>
+<br>
+Concerning legend and tradition about our Will, it seems that, in each
+case, we should do our best to trace the <i>Quellen</i>,<i> </i>to discover
+the original sources, and the steps by which the tale arrived at its
+late recorders in print; and then each man&rsquo;s view as to the veracity
+of the story will rest on his sense of probability; and on his bias,
+his wish to believe or to disbelieve.<br>
+<br>
+There exists, I believe, only one personal anecdote of Will, the actor,
+and on it the Baconians base an argument against the contemporary recognition
+of him as a dramatic author.&nbsp; I take the criticism of Mr. Greenwood
+(who is not a Baconian).&nbsp; One John Manningham, Barrister-at-Law,
+&ldquo;a well-educated and cultured man,&rdquo; notes in his Diary (February
+2, 1601) that &ldquo;at our feast we had a play called Twelve Night
+or What you Will, much like the Comedy of Errors, or Men&aelig;chmi
+in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called <i>Inganni.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+</i>He confides to his Diary the tricks played on Malvolio as &ldquo;a
+good practice.&rdquo; <a name="citation0c"></a><a href="#footnote0c">{0c}</a>&nbsp;
+That is all.<br>
+<br>
+About the authorship he says nothing: perhaps he neither knew nor cared
+who the author was.&nbsp; In our day the majority of people who tell
+me about a play which they have seen, cannot tell me the name of the
+author.&nbsp; Yet it is usually printed on the playbill, though in modest
+type.&nbsp; The public does not care a straw about the author&rsquo;s
+name, unless he be deservedly famous for writing letters to the newspapers
+on things in general; for his genius as an orator; his enthusiasm as
+a moralist, or in any other extraneous way.&nbsp; Dr. Forman in his
+queer account of the plot of &ldquo;Mack Beth&rdquo; does not allude
+to the name of the author (April 20, 1610).&nbsp; <i>Twelfth Night </i>was
+not published till 1623, in the Folio: there was no quarto to enlighten
+Manningham about the author&rsquo;s name.&nbsp; We do not hear of printed
+playbills, with author&rsquo;s names inserted, at that period.&nbsp;
+It seems probable that occasional playgoers knew and cared no more about
+authors than they do at present.&nbsp; The world of the wits, the critics
+(such as Francis Meres), poets, playwrights, and players, did know and
+care about the authors; apparently Manningham did not.&nbsp; But he
+heard a piquant anecdote of two players and (March 13, 1601) inserted
+it in his Diary.<br>
+<br>
+Shakespeare once anticipated Richard Burbage at an amorous tryst with
+a citizen&rsquo;s wife.&nbsp; Burbage had, by the way, been playing
+the part of Richard III.&nbsp; While Will was engaged in illicit dalliance,
+the message was brought (what a moment for bringing messages!) that
+Richard III was at the door, and Will &ldquo;caused return to be made
+that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+name William</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; (My italics.)&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood argues
+that if &ldquo;Shakspere the player was known to the world as the author
+of the plays of Shakespeare, it does seem extremely remarkable&rdquo;
+that Manningham should have thought it needful to add &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+name William.&rdquo; <a name="citation0d"></a><a href="#footnote0d">{0d}</a><br>
+<br>
+But <i>was </i>&ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo; or any man, &ldquo;known to
+the world as the author of the plays of Shakespeare&rdquo;?&nbsp; No!
+for Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;nobody, outside a very small circle,
+troubled his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists might be.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation0e"></a><a href="#footnote0e">{0e}</a>&nbsp; To that
+&ldquo;very small circle&rdquo; we have no reason to suppose that Manningham
+belonged, despite his remarkable opinion that <i>Twelfth Night </i>resembles
+the <i>Men&aelig;chmi</i>.&nbsp; Consequently, it is <i>not </i>&ldquo;extremely
+remarkable&rdquo; that Manningham wrote &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s name
+William,&rdquo; to explain to posterity the joke about &ldquo;William
+the Conqueror,&rdquo; instead of saying, &ldquo;the brilliant author
+of the Twelfth Night play which so much amused me at our feast a few
+weeks ago.&rdquo; <a name="citation0f"></a><a href="#footnote0f">{0f}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Remarkable&rdquo; out of all hooping it would have been had Manningham
+written in the style of Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; But Manningham apparently
+did not &ldquo;trouble his head as to who the dramatist or dramatists
+might be.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Nobody, outside a very small circle,&rdquo;
+<i>did </i>trouble his poor head about that point.&nbsp; Yet Mr. Greenwood
+thinks &ldquo;it does seem extremely remarkable&rdquo; that Manningham
+did not mention the author.<br>
+<br>
+Later, on the publication of the Folio (1623), the world seems to have
+taken more interest in literary matters.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood says that
+then while &ldquo;the multitude&rdquo; would take Ben Jonson&rsquo;s
+noble panegyric on Shakespeare as a poet &ldquo;<i>au pied de la lettre</i>,&rdquo;<i>
+</i>&ldquo;the enlightened few would recognise that it had an esoteric
+meaning.&rdquo; <a name="citation0g"></a><a href="#footnote0g">{0g}</a>&nbsp;
+Then, it seems, &ldquo;the world&rdquo; - the &ldquo;multitude&rdquo;
+- regarded the actor as the author.&nbsp; Only &ldquo;the enlightened
+few&rdquo; were aware that when Ben <i>said </i>&ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Swan of Avon,&rdquo; he <i>meant</i> - somebody else.<br>
+<br>
+Quite different inferences are drawn from the same facts by persons
+of different mental conditions.&nbsp; For example, in 1635 or 1636,
+Cuthbert Burbage, brother of Richard, the famous actor, Will&rsquo;s
+comrade, petitioned Lord Pembroke, then Lord Chamberlain, for consideration
+in a quarrel about certain theatres.&nbsp; Telling the history of the
+houses, he mentions that the Burbages &ldquo;to ourselves joined those
+deserving men, Shakspere, Heminge, Condell, Phillips and others.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Cuthbert is arguing his case solely from the point of the original owners
+or lease-holders of the houses, and of the well-known actors to whom
+they joined themselves.&nbsp; Judge Webb and Mr. Greenwood think that
+&ldquo;it does indeed seem strange . . . that the proprietor[s] of the
+playhouses which had been made famous by the production of the Shakespearean
+plays, should, in 1635 - twelve years after the publication of the great
+Folio - describe their reputed author to the survivor of the Incomparable
+Pair, as merely a &lsquo;man-player&rsquo; and &lsquo;a deserving man.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Why did he not remind the Lord Chamberlain that this &ldquo;deserving
+man&rdquo; was the author of all these famous dramas?&nbsp; Was it because
+he was aware that the Earl of Pembroke &ldquo;knew better than that&rdquo;?
+<a name="citation0h"></a><a href="#footnote0h">{0h}</a><br>
+<br>
+These arguments are regarded by some Baconians as proof positive of
+their case.<br>
+<br>
+Cuthbert Burbage, in 1635 or 1636, did not remind the Earl of what the
+Earl knew very well, that the Folio had been dedicated, in 1623, to
+him and his brother, by Will&rsquo;s friends, Heminge and Condell, as
+they had been patrons of the late William Shakspere and admirers of
+his plays.&nbsp; The terms of this dedication are to be cited in the
+text, later.&nbsp; <i>We </i>all <i>now </i>would have reminded the
+Earl of what he very well knew.&nbsp; Cuthbert did not.<br>
+<br>
+The intelligence of Cuthbert Burbage may be gauged by anyone who will
+read pp. 481-484 in <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,<i>
+</i>by the late Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton.&nbsp; Cuthbert
+was a puzzle-pated old boy.&nbsp; The silence as to Will&rsquo;s authorship
+on the part of this muddle-headed old Cuthbert, in 1635-36, cannot outweigh
+the explicit and positive public testimony to his authorship, signed
+by his friends and fellow-actors in 1623.<br>
+<br>
+Men believe what they may; but I prefer positive evidence for the affirmative
+to negative evidence from silence, the silence of Cuthbert Burbage.<br>
+<br>
+One may read through Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s three books and note the
+engaging varieties of his views; they vary as suits his argument; but
+he is unaware of it, or can justify his varyings.&nbsp; Thus, in 1610,
+one John Davies wrote rhymes in which he speaks of &ldquo;our English
+Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare&rdquo;; &ldquo;good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+In his period patriotic English critics called a comic dramatist &ldquo;the
+English Terence,&rdquo; or &ldquo;the English Plautus,&rdquo; precisely
+as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant &ldquo;the American Wordsworth,&rdquo;
+or Cooper &ldquo;the American Scott&rdquo;; and as Scots called the
+Rev. Mr. Thomson &ldquo;the Scottish Turner.&rdquo;&nbsp; Somewhere,
+I believe, exists &ldquo;the Belgian Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Following this practice, Davies had to call Will either &ldquo;our English
+Terence,&rdquo; or &ldquo;our English Plautus.&rdquo;&nbsp; Aristophanes
+would not have been generally recognised; and Will was no more like
+one of these ancient authors than another.&nbsp; Thus Davies was apt
+to choose either Plautus or Terence; it was even betting which he selected.&nbsp;
+But he chanced to choose Terence; and this is &ldquo;curious,&rdquo;
+and suggests suspicions to Mr. Greenwood - and the Baconians.&nbsp;
+They are so very full of suspicions!<br>
+<br>
+It does not suit the Baconians, or Mr. Greenwood, to find contemporary
+recognition of Will as an author. <a name="citation0i"></a><a href="#footnote0i">{0i}</a>&nbsp;
+Consequently, Mr. Greenwood finds Davies&rsquo;s &ldquo;curious, and
+at first sight, inappropriate comparison of &lsquo;Shake-speare&rsquo;
+to Terence worthy of remark, for Terence is the very author whose name
+is alleged to have been used as a mask-name, or <i>nom de plume</i>,<i>
+</i>for the writings of great men who wished to keep the fact of their
+authorship concealed.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Now Davies felt bound to bring in <i>some </i>Roman parallel to Shakespeare;
+and had only the choice of Terence or Plautus.&nbsp; Meres (1598)<i>
+</i>used Plautus; Davies used Terence.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation0j"></a><a href="#footnote0j">{0j}</a>
+shows us that Plautus would not do.&nbsp; &ldquo;Could <i>he</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>(Shakespeare) &ldquo;write only of courtesans and <i>cocottes</i>,<i>
+</i>and not of ladies highly born, cultured, and refined? . . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The supposed parallel&rdquo; (Plautus and Shakespeare) &ldquo;breaks
+down at every point.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus, on Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s showing,
+Plautus could not serve Davies, or should not serve him, in his search
+for a Roman parallel to &ldquo;good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood
+also writes, &ldquo;if he&rdquo; (Shakespeare) &ldquo;was to be likened
+to a Latin comedian, surely Plautus is the writer with whom he should
+have been compared.&rdquo; <a name="citation0k"></a><a href="#footnote0k">{0k}</a>&nbsp;
+Yet Plautus was the very man who cannot be used as a parallel to Shakespeare.&nbsp;
+Of course no Roman nor any other comic dramatist closely resembles the
+<i>author </i>of <i>As You Like It</i>.&nbsp; They who selected either
+Plautus or Terence meant no more than that both were celebrated comic
+dramatists.&nbsp; Plautus was no parallel to Will.&nbsp; Yet &ldquo;surely
+Plautus is the author to whom he should have been compared&rdquo; by
+Davies, says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; If Davies tried Plautus, the comparison
+was bad; if Terence, it was &ldquo;curious,&rdquo; as Terence was absurdly
+accused of being the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>of some
+great &ldquo;concealed poets&rdquo; of Rome.&nbsp; &ldquo;From all the
+known facts about Terence,&rdquo; says a Baconian critic (who has consulted
+Smith&rsquo;s <i>Biographical Dictionary</i>), &ldquo;it is an almost
+unavoidable inference that John Davies made the comparison to Shakspere
+because he knew of the point common to both cases.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+common point is taken to be, not that both men were famous comic dramatists,
+but that Roman literary gossips said, and that Baconians and Mr. Greenwood
+say, that &ldquo;Terence&rdquo; was said to be a &ldquo;mask-name,&rdquo;
+and that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; is a mask-name.&nbsp; Of the second
+opinion there is not a hint in literature of the time of good Will.<br>
+<br>
+What surprises one most in this controversy is that men eminent in the
+legal profession should be &ldquo;anti-Shakesperean,&rdquo; if not overtly
+Baconian.&nbsp; For the evidence for the contemporary faith in Will&rsquo;s
+authorship is all positive; from his own age comes not a whisper of
+doubt, not even a murmur of surprise.&nbsp; It is incredible to me that
+his fellow-actors and fellow-playwrights should have been deceived,
+especially when they were such men as Ben Jonson and Tom Heywood.&nbsp;
+One would expect lawyers, of all people, to have been most impatient
+of the surprising attempts made to explain away Ben Jonson&rsquo;s testimony,
+by aid, first, of quite a false analogy (Scott&rsquo;s denial of his
+own authorship of his novels), and, secondly, by the suppression of
+such a familiar fact as the constant inconsistency of Ben&rsquo;s judgments
+of his contemporaries in literature.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood must have forgotten
+the many examples of this inconsistency; but I have met a Baconian author
+who knew nothing of the fact.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, it is proper to say,
+does not seem to be satisfied that he has solved what he calls &ldquo;the
+Jonsonian riddle.&rdquo;&nbsp; Really, there is no riddle.&nbsp; About
+Will, as about other authors, his contemporaries and even his friends,
+on occasion, Ben &ldquo;spoke with two voices,&rdquo; now in terms of
+hyperbolical praise, now in carping tones of censure.&nbsp; That is
+the obvious solution of &ldquo;the Jonsonian riddle.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I must apologise if I have in places spelled the name of the Swan of
+Avon &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; where Mr. Greenwood would write &ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo;
+and <i>vice versa</i>.&nbsp; He uses &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; where
+he means the Author; &ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo; where he means Will; and
+is vexed with some people who write the name of Will as &ldquo;Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+As Will, in the opinion of a considerable portion of the human race,
+and of myself, <i>was </i>the Author, one is apt to write his name as
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; in the usual way.&nbsp; But difficult cases
+occur, as in quotations, and in conditional sentences.&nbsp; By any
+spelling of the name I always mean the undivided personality of &ldquo;Him
+who sleeps by Avon.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I: THE BACONIAN AND ANTI-WILLIAN POSITIONS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Till the years 1856-7 no voice was raised against the current belief
+about Shakespeare (1564-1616).&nbsp; He was the author in the main of
+the plays usually printed as his.&nbsp; In some cases other authors,
+one or more, may have had fingers in his dramas; in other cases, Shakespeare
+may have &ldquo;written over&rdquo; and transfigured earlier plays,
+of himself and of others; he may have contributed, more or less, to
+several plays mainly by other men.&nbsp; Separately printed dramas published
+during his time carry his name on their title-pages, but are not included
+in the first collected edition of his dramas, &ldquo;The First Folio,&rdquo;
+put forth by two of his friends and fellow-actors, in 1623, seven years
+after his death.<br>
+<br>
+On all these matters did commentators, critics, and antiquarians for
+long dispute; but none denied that the actor, Will Shakspere (spelled
+as heaven pleased), was in the main the author of most of the plays
+of 1623, and the sole author of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> Lucrece</i>,<i>
+</i>and the Sonnets.<br>
+<br>
+Even now, in England at least, it would be perhaps impossible to find
+one special and professed student of Elizabethan literature, and of
+the classical and European literatures, who does not hold by the ancient
+belief, the belief of Shakespeare&rsquo;s contemporaries and intimates,
+the belief that he was, in the sense explained above, the author of
+the plays.<br>
+<br>
+But ours is not a generation to be overawed by &ldquo;Authority&rdquo;
+(as it is called).&nbsp; A small but eager company of scholars have
+convinced themselves that Francis Bacon wrote the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp;
+That is the point of agreement among these enthusiasts: points of difference
+are numerous: some very wild little sects exist.&nbsp; Meanwhile multitudes
+of earnest and intelligent men and women, having read notices in newspapers
+of the Baconian books, or heard of them at lectures and tea-parties,
+disbelieve in the authorship of &ldquo;the Stratford rustic,&rdquo;
+and look down on the faithful of Will Shakespere with extreme contempt.<br>
+<br>
+From the Baconians we receive a plain straightforward theory, &ldquo;Bacon
+wrote Shakespeare,&rdquo; as one of their own prophets has said. <a name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a">{4a}</a>&nbsp;
+Since we have plenty of evidence for Bacon&rsquo;s life and occupations
+during the period of Shakespearean poetic activity, we can compare what
+he was doing as a man, a student, a Crown lawyer, a pleader in the Courts,
+a political pamphleteer, essayist, courtier, active member of Parliament,
+and so on, with what he is said to have been doing - by the Baconians;
+namely, writing two dramas yearly.<br>
+<br>
+But there is another &ldquo;Anti-Willian&rdquo; theory, which would
+dethrone Will Shakspere, and put but a Shadow in his place.&nbsp; Conceive
+a &ldquo;concealed poet,&rdquo; of high social position, contemporary
+with Bacon and Shakespeare.&nbsp; Let him be so fond of the Law that
+he cannot keep legal &ldquo;shop&rdquo; out of his love Sonnets even.&nbsp;
+Make him a courtier; a statesman; a philosopher; a scholar who does
+not blench even from the difficult Latin of Ovid and Plautus.&nbsp;
+Let this almost omniscient being possess supreme poetic genius, extensive
+classical attainments, and a tendency to make false quantities.&nbsp;
+Then conceive him to live through the reigns of &ldquo;Eliza and our
+James,&rdquo; without leaving in history, in science, in society, in
+law, in politics or scholarship, a single trace of his existence.&nbsp;
+He left nothing but the poems and plays usually attributed to Will.&nbsp;
+As to the date of his decease, we only know that it must necessarily
+have been later than the composition of the last genuine Shakespearean
+play - for this paragon wrote it.<br>
+<br>
+Such is the Being who occupies, in the theory of the non-Baconian, <i>but
+not Anti</i>-<i>Baconian</i>,<i> </i>Anti-Willians, the intellectual
+throne filled, in the Will Shakespeare theory, by Will; and in the Baconian,
+by Bacon - two kings of Brentford on one throne.<br>
+<br>
+We are to be much engaged by the form of this theory which is held by
+Mr. G. G. Greenwood in his <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>.&nbsp;
+In attempting to explain what he means I feel that I am skating on very
+thin ice.&nbsp; Already, in two volumes (<i>In Re Shakespeare</i>,<i>
+</i>1909, and <i>The Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>), Mr. Greenwood
+has accused his critics of frequently misconceiving and misrepresenting
+his ideas: wherefore I also tremble.&nbsp; I am perfectly confident
+in saying that he &ldquo;holds no brief for the Baconians.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He is <i>not </i>a Baconian.&nbsp; His position is negative merely:
+Will of Stratford is <i>not </i>the author of the Shakespearean plays
+and poems.&nbsp; Then who is?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood believes that work
+by an unknown number of hands exists in the plays first published all
+together in 1623.&nbsp; Here few will differ from him.&nbsp; But, setting
+aside this aspect of the case, Mr. Greenwood appears to me to believe
+in an entity named &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; or &ldquo;the Author,&rdquo;
+who is the predominating partner; though Mr. Greenwood does not credit
+him with all the plays in the Folio of 1623 (nor, perhaps, with the
+absolute entirety of any given play).&nbsp; &ldquo;The Author&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; is not a syndicate (like the Homer of many
+critics), but an individual human being, apparently of the male sex.&nbsp;
+As to the name by which he was called on earth, Mr. Greenwood is &ldquo;agnostic.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He himself is not Anti-Baconian.&nbsp; He does not oust Bacon and put
+the Unknown in his place.&nbsp; He neither affirms nor denies that Bacon
+may have contributed, more or less, to the bulk of Shakespearean work.&nbsp;
+To put it briefly: Mr. Greenwood backs the field against the favourite
+(our Will), and Bacon <i>may </i>be in the field.&nbsp; If he has any
+part in the whole I suspect that it is &ldquo;the lion&rsquo;s part,&rdquo;
+but Mr. Greenwood does not commit himself to anything positive.&nbsp;
+We shall find (if I am not mistaken) that Mr. Greenwood regards the
+hypothesis of the Baconians as &ldquo;an extremely reasonable one,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation7a"></a><a href="#footnote7a">{7a}</a> and that for
+his purposes it would be an extremely serviceable one, if not even essential.&nbsp;
+For as Bacon was a genius to whose potentialities one can set no limit,
+he is something to stand by, whereas we cannot easily believe - I cannot
+believe - that the actual &ldquo;Author,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+lived and died and left no trace of his existence except his share in
+the works called Shakespearean.<br>
+<br>
+However, the idea of the Great Unknown has, for its partisans, this
+advantage, that as the life of the august Shade is wholly unknown, we
+cannot, as in Bacon&rsquo;s case, show how he was occupied while the
+plays were being composed.&nbsp; He <i>must</i>,<i> </i>however, have
+been much at Court, we learn, and deep in the mysteries of legal terminology.&nbsp;
+Was he Sir Edward Coke?&nbsp; Was he James VI and I?<br>
+<br>
+It is hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the
+&ldquo;Anti-Willians&rdquo; in a shape which will satisfy them.&nbsp;
+The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is
+perhaps impossible.&nbsp; I can only summarise their views in my own
+words as far as I presume to understand them.&nbsp; I conceive the Baconians
+to cry that &ldquo;the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature,
+attributed to a man named William <i>Shakespeare</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of
+a man named William <i>Shakspere </i>(there are many varieties of spelling)
+we certainly know that he was born (1564) and bred in Stratford-on-Avon,
+a peculiarly dirty, stagnant, and ignorant country town.&nbsp; There
+is absolutely no evidence that he (or any Stratford boy of his standing)
+ever went to Stratford school.&nbsp; His father, his mother, and his
+daughter could not write, but, in signing, made their marks; and if
+he could write, which some of us deny, he wrote a terribly bad hand.&nbsp;
+As far as late traditions of seventy or eighty years after his death
+inform us, he was a butcher&rsquo;s apprentice; and also a schoolmaster
+&ldquo;who knew Latin pretty well&rdquo;; and a poacher.&nbsp; He made,
+before he was nineteen, a marriage tainted with what Meg Dods calls
+&ldquo;ante-nup.&rdquo;&nbsp; He early had three children, whom he deserted,
+as he deserted his wife.&nbsp; He came to London, we do not know when
+(about 1582, according to the &ldquo;guess&rdquo; of an antiquary of
+1680); held horses at the door of a theatre (so tradition says), was
+promoted to the rank of &ldquo;servitor&rdquo; (whatever that may mean),
+became an actor (a vagabond under the Act), and by 1594 played before
+Queen Elizabeth.&nbsp; He put money in his pocket (heaven knows how),
+for by 1597 he was bargaining for the best house in his native <i>bourgade.&nbsp;
+</i>He obtained, by nefarious genealogical falsehoods (too common, alas,
+in heraldry), the right to bear arms; and went on acting.&nbsp; In 1610-11
+(?) he retired to his native place.&nbsp; He never took any interest
+in his unprinted manuscript plays; though rapacious, he never troubled
+himself about his valuable copyrights; never dreamed of making a collected
+edition of his works.&nbsp; He died in 1616, probably of drink taken.&nbsp;
+Legal documents prove him to have been a lender of small sums, an avid
+creditor, a would-be encloser of commons.&nbsp; In his will he does
+not bequeath or mention any books, manuscripts, copyrights, and so forth.&nbsp;
+It is utterly incredible, then, that this man wrote the poems and plays,
+so rich in poetry, thought, scholarship, and knowledge, which are attributed
+to &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; These must be the works
+of &ldquo;a concealed poet,&rdquo; a philosopher, a courtier moving
+in the highest circles, a supreme legist, and, necessarily, a great
+poet, and student of the classics.<br>
+<br>
+No known person of the age but one, Bacon, was a genius, a legist, a
+scholar, a great poet, and brilliant courtier, with all the other qualifications
+so the author of the plays either was Francis Bacon - or some person
+unknown, who was in all respects equally distinguished, but kept his
+light under a bushel.&nbsp; Consequently the name &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo;
+is a pseudonym or &ldquo;pen-name&rdquo; wisely adopted by Bacon (or
+the other man) as early as 1593, at a time when William Shakspere was
+notoriously an actor in the company which produced the plays of the
+genius styling himself &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Let me repeat that, to the best of my powers of understanding and of
+expression, and in my own words, so as to misquote nobody, I have now
+summarised the views of the Baconians <i>sans phrase</i>,<i> </i>and
+of the more cautious or more credulous &ldquo;Anti-Willians,&rdquo;
+as I may style the party who deny to Will the actor any share in the
+authorship of the plays, but do not overtly assign it to Francis Bacon.<br>
+<br>
+Beyond all comparison the best work on the Anti-Willian side of the
+controversy is <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>by Mr.
+G. G. Greenwood (see my Introduction).&nbsp; To this volume I turn for
+the exposition of the theory that &ldquo;Will Shakspere&rdquo; (with
+many other spellings) is an actor from the country - a man of very scanty
+education, in all probability, and wholly destitute of books; while
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare,&rdquo; or with the hyphen, &ldquo;Shake-speare,&rdquo;
+is a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; adopted by the Great Unknown
+&ldquo;concealed poet.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+When I use the word &ldquo;author&rdquo; here, I understand Mr. Greenwood
+to mean that in the plays called &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; there exists
+work from many pens: owing to the curious literary manners, methods,
+and ethics of dramatic writing in, say, 1589-1611.&nbsp; In my own poor
+opinion this is certainly true of several plays in the first collected
+edition, &ldquo;The Folio,&rdquo; produced seven years after Will&rsquo;s
+death, namely in 1623.&nbsp; These curious &ldquo;collective&rdquo;
+methods of play-writing are to be considered later.<br>
+<br>
+Matters become much more perplexing when we examine the theory that
+&ldquo;William Shake-speare&rdquo; (with or without the hyphen), on
+the title-pages of plays, or when signed to the dedications of poems,
+is the chosen pen-name, or &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>of
+Bacon or of the Unknown.<br>
+<br>
+Here I must endeavour to summarise what Mr. Greenwood has written <a name="citation11a"></a><a href="#footnote11a">{11a}</a>
+on the name of the actor, and the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>of the unknown author who, by the theory, was not the actor.&nbsp;
+Let me first confess my firm belief that there is no cause for all the
+copious writing about the spellings &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; or &ldquo;Shake-speare&rdquo;
+- as indicating the true but &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; - and &ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo;
+(&amp;c.), as indicating the Warwickshire rustic.&nbsp; At Stratford
+and in Warwickshire the clan-name was spelled in scores of ways, was
+spelled in different ways within a single document.&nbsp; If the actor
+himself uniformly wrote &ldquo;Shakspere&rdquo; (it seems that we have
+but five signatures), he was accustomed to seeing the name spelled variously
+in documents concerning him and his affairs.&nbsp; In London the printers
+aimed at a kind of uniformity, &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; or &ldquo;Shake-speare&rdquo;:
+and even if he wrote his own name otherwise, to him it was indifferent.&nbsp;
+Lawyers and printers might choose their own mode of spelling - and there
+is no more in the matter.<br>
+<br>
+I must now summarise briefly, in my own words, save where quotations
+are indicated in the usual way, the results of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+researches.&nbsp; &ldquo;The family of William Shakspere of Stratford&rdquo;
+(perhaps it were safer to say &ldquo;the members of his name&rdquo;)
+&ldquo;wrote their name in many different ways - some sixty, I believe,
+have been noted . . . but the form &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; seems never
+to have been employed by them&rdquo;; and, according to Mr. Spedding,
+&ldquo;Shakspere of Stratford never so wrote his name &lsquo;in any
+known case.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; (According to many Baconians he never
+wrote his name in his life.)&nbsp; On the other hand, the dedications
+of <i>Venus and Adonis</i> (1593) and of <i>Lucrece </i>(1594) are inscribed
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; (without the hyphen).&nbsp; In 1598,
+the title-page of <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost
+</i>&ldquo;bore the name W. Shakespere,&rdquo; while in the same year
+<i>Richard II </i>and <i>Richard III </i>bear &ldquo;William Shake-speare,&rdquo;
+with the hyphen (not without it, as in the two dedications by the Author).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The name which appears in the body of the conveyance and of the
+mortgage bearing&rdquo; (the actor&rsquo;s) &ldquo;signature is &lsquo;Shakespeare,&rsquo;
+while &lsquo;Shackspeare&rsquo; appears in the will, prepared, as we
+must presume, by or under the directions of Francis Collyns, the Stratford
+solicitor, who was one of the witnesses thereto&rdquo; (and received
+a legacy of &pound;13, 6<i>s</i>. 8<i>d</i>.).<br>
+<br>
+Thus, at Stratford even, the name was spelled, in legal papers, as it
+is spelled in the two dedications, and in most of the title-pages -
+and also is spelled otherwise, as &ldquo;Shackspeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; In
+March 1594 the actor&rsquo;s name is spelled &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+in Treasury accounts.&nbsp; The legal and the literary and Treasury
+spellings (and conveyances and mortgages and wills are <i>not </i>literature)
+are Shakespeare, Shackspeare, Shake-speare, Shakespere - all four are
+used, but we must regard the actor as never signing &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+in any of these varieties of spelling - if sign he ever did; at all
+events he is not known to have used the <i>a </i>in the last syllable.<br>
+<br>
+I now give the essence of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s words <a name="citation13a"></a><a href="#footnote13a">{13a}</a>
+concerning the <i>nom de plume </i>of the &ldquo;concealed poet,&rdquo;
+whoever he was.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And now a word upon the name &lsquo;Shakespeare.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+That in this form, and more especially with a hyphen, Shake-speare,
+the word makes an excellent <i>nom de plume </i>is obvious.&nbsp; As
+old Thomas Fuller remarks, the name suggests <i>Martial </i>in its warlike
+sound, &lsquo;Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is of course
+further suggestive of Pallas Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, for Pallas
+also was a spear-shaker (Pallas &alpha;&pi;&omicron; &tau;&omicron;&upsilon;
+&pi;&alpha;&lambda;&lambda;&epsilon;&iota;&nu; &tau;&omicron; &delta;&omicron;&rho;&upsilon;);
+and all will remember Ben Jonson&rsquo;s verses . . . &rdquo; on Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;true-filed lines&rdquo; -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In each of which he seems to shake a lance,<br>
+As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is more about Pallas in book-titles (to which additions can easily
+be made), and about &ldquo;Jonson&rsquo;s Cri-spinus or Cri-spinas,&rdquo;
+but perhaps we have now the gist of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s remarks on
+the &ldquo;excellent <i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; (<i>cf. </i>pp. 31-37.&nbsp;
+On the whole of this, <i>cf. The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 293-295; a <i>nom de plume </i>called a &ldquo;pseudonym,&rdquo;
+pp. 307, 312; Shakespeare &ldquo;a mask name,&rdquo; p. 328; a &ldquo;pseudonym,&rdquo;
+p. 330; &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>p. 335).<br>
+<br>
+Now why was the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>or &ldquo;pseudonym&rdquo;
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; &ldquo;an excellent <i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>for a concealed author, courtier, lawyer, scholar, and so forth?&nbsp;
+If &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; suggested Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom
+and of many other things, and so was appropriate, why add &ldquo;William&rdquo;?<br>
+<br>
+In 1593, when the &ldquo;pseudonym&rdquo; first appears in <i>Venus
+and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>a country actor whose name, in legal documents
+- presumably drawn up by or for his friend, Francis Collyns at Stratford
+- is written &ldquo;William Shakespeare,&rdquo; was before the town
+as an actor in the leading company, that of the Lord Chamberlain.&nbsp;
+This company produced the plays some of which, by 1598, bear &ldquo;W.
+Shakespere,&rdquo; or &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; on their title-pages.&nbsp;
+Thus, even if the actor habitually spelled his name &ldquo;Shakspere,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; was, practically (on the Baconian
+theory), not only a pseudonym of one man, a poet, but also the real
+name of another man, a well-known actor, who was <i>not </i>the &ldquo;concealed
+poet.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; or &ldquo;Shakespere&rdquo; was thus,
+in my view, the ideally worst pseudonym which a poet who wished to be
+&ldquo;concealed&rdquo; could possibly have had the fatuity to select.&nbsp;
+His plays and poems would be, as they were, universally attributed to
+the actor, who is represented as a person conspicuously incapable of
+writing them.&nbsp; With Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s arguments against the
+certainty of this attribution I deal later.<br>
+<br>
+Had the actor been a man of rare wit, and of good education and wide
+reading, the choice of name might have been judicious.&nbsp; A &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo; of high social standing, with a strange fancy for rewriting
+the plays of contemporary playwrights, might obtain the manuscript copies
+from their owners, the Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s Company, through that
+knowledgeable, witty, and venal member of the company, Will Shakspere.&nbsp;
+He might then rewrite and improve them, more or less, as it was his
+whim to do.&nbsp; The actor might make fair copies in his own hand,
+give them to his company, and say that the improved works were from
+his own pen and genius.&nbsp; The lie might pass, but only if the actor,
+in his life and witty talk, seemed very capable of doing what he pretended
+to have done.&nbsp; But if the actor, according to some Baconians, could
+not write even his own name, he was impossible as a mask for the poet.&nbsp;
+He was also impossible, I think, if he were what Mr. Greenwood describes
+him to be.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, in his view of the actor as he was when he came to London,
+does not deny to him the gift of being able to sign his name.&nbsp;
+But, if he were educated at Stratford Free School (of which there is
+no documentary record), according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps &ldquo;he
+was removed from school long before the usual age,&rdquo; &ldquo;in
+all probability&rdquo; when &ldquo;he was about thirteen&rdquo; (an
+age at which some boys, later well known, went up to their universities).&nbsp;
+If we send him to school at seven or so, &ldquo;it appears that he could
+only have enjoyed such advantages as it may be supposed to have provided
+for a period of five or six years at the outside.&nbsp; He was then
+withdrawn, and, as it seems, put to calf-slaughtering.&rdquo; <a name="citation16a"></a><a href="#footnote16a">{16a}</a><br>
+<br>
+What the advantages may have been we try to estimate later.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, with Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, thinks that Will &ldquo;could
+have learned but little there.&nbsp; No doubt boys at Elizabethan grammar
+schools, if they remained long enough, had a good deal of Latin driven
+into them.&nbsp; Latin, indeed, was the one subject that was taught;
+and an industrious boy who had gone through the course and attained
+to the higher classes would generally be able to write fair Latin prose.&nbsp;
+But he would learn very little else&rdquo; (except to write fair Latin
+prose?).&nbsp; &ldquo;What we now call &lsquo;culture&rsquo; certainly
+did not enter into the &lsquo;curriculum,&rsquo; nor &lsquo;English,&rsquo;
+nor modern languages, nor &lsquo;literature.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation17a"></a><a href="#footnote17a">{17a}</a>&nbsp;
+Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that &ldquo;removed prematurely from school,
+residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown
+into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress - it is
+difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all
+but destitute of polished accomplishments.&rdquo; <a name="citation17b"></a><a href="#footnote17b">{17b}</a>&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship to a butcher or draper, but doubts
+the poaching, and the frequent whippings and imprisonments, as in the
+story told by the Rev. R. Davies in 1708. <a name="citation17c"></a><a href="#footnote17c">{17c}</a><br>
+<br>
+That this promising young man, &ldquo;when he came to London, spoke
+the Warwickshire dialect or <i>patois </i>is, then, as certain as anything
+can be that is incapable of mathematical proof.&rdquo; <a name="citation17d"></a><a href="#footnote17d">{17d}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Here is the young Warwickshire provincial . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation17e"></a><a href="#footnote17e">{17e}</a>
+producing, apparently five or six years after his arrival in town, <i>Venus
+and Adonis </i>. . . &ldquo;Is it conceivable that this was the work
+of the Stratford Player of whom we know so little, but of whom we know
+so much too much?&nbsp; If so we have here a veritable sixteenth-century
+miracle.&rdquo; <a name="citation17f"></a><a href="#footnote17f">{17f}</a>&nbsp;
+Moreover, &ldquo;our great supposed poet and dramatist had at his death
+neither book nor manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally
+entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever.&rdquo; <a name="citation17g"></a><a href="#footnote17g">{17g}</a><br>
+<br>
+If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a <i>patois
+</i>could write <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, manifestly it was inconceivable
+in 1593, when <i>Venus and Adonis </i>was signed &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the
+author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that
+the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor&rsquo;s authorship; ignorant
+as he was, bookless, and rude of speech.&nbsp; For such a Will as Mr.
+Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and dramatic world of his
+age that he <i>did </i>write the plays, would have been a miracle.&nbsp;
+Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to persuade us that there is no
+sufficient evidence that Will <i>did </i>persuade, say Ben Jonson, of
+his authorship and we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-century
+miracle of persuasion.<br>
+<br>
+Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic
+Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass
+for the Author. <a name="citation18a"></a><a href="#footnote18a">{18a}</a>&nbsp;
+But his own bookless actor with a <i>patois </i>seems to him, as author
+of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>almost inconceivable.&nbsp; Yet,
+despite Will&rsquo;s bookless rusticity, this poem with <i>Lucrece</i>,<i>
+</i>which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English
+by 1593, was regarded as his own.&nbsp; I must suppose, therefore, that
+Will was <i>not </i>manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood
+thinks.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think it highly probable,&rdquo; says this critic,
+&ldquo;that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford&rdquo; (where
+nothing but Latin was taught) &ldquo;for four or five years, and that,
+later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to &lsquo;bumbast
+out a line,&rsquo; and perhaps to pose as &lsquo;Poet-Ape that would
+be thought our chief.&rsquo;&nbsp; Nay, I am not at all sure that he
+would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George
+Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better.&nbsp;
+But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of <i>Venus
+and Adonis </i>or of <i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo; <a name="citation19a"></a><a href="#footnote19a">{19a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins,
+but could not write <i>Venus and Adonis</i>.&nbsp; Will, therefore,
+though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature,
+in partnership with Wilkins.&nbsp; We have merely the critic&rsquo;s
+opinion that Will could not write <i>Hamlet</i>,<i> </i>even if, like
+Wordsworth, &ldquo;he had the mind,&rdquo; even if the gods had made
+him more poetical than Wilkins.<br>
+<br>
+Again, &ldquo;he had had but little schooling; he had &lsquo;small Latin
+and less Greek&rsquo;&rdquo; (as Ben Jonson truly says), &ldquo;but
+he was a good <i>Johannes Factotum; </i>he could arrange a scene, and,
+when necessary, &lsquo;bumbast out a blank verse.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation19b"></a><a href="#footnote19b">{19b}</a><br>
+<br>
+The &ldquo;<i>Johannes Factotum</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>who could &ldquo;bumbast
+out a blank verse,&rdquo; is taken from Robert Greene&rsquo;s hackneyed
+attack on an actor-poet, &ldquo;Shake-scene,&rdquo; published in 1592.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief,&rdquo; is from an epigram
+on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601-16?).&nbsp; If the allusions by
+Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592, had a literary ambition
+so towering that he thought his own work in the new art of dramatic
+blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not to speak of Wilkins),
+and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to three of his playwright
+friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.<br>
+<br>
+If Jonson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; be meant for Will, by 1601
+Will would fain &ldquo;be thought the chief&rdquo; of contemporary dramatists.&nbsp;
+His vanity soared far above George Wilkins!&nbsp; Greene&rsquo;s phrases
+and Jonson&rsquo;s are dictated by spite, jealousy, and envy; and from
+them a true view of the work of the man whom they envy, the actor-poet,
+cannot be obtained.&nbsp; We might as well judge Moli&egrave;re in the
+spirit of the author of <i>Elomire Hypocondre</i>,<i> </i>and of de
+Vis&eacute;!&nbsp; The Anti-Willian arguments keep on appearing, going
+behind the scenes, and reappearing, like a stage army.&nbsp; To avoid
+this phenomenon I reserve what is to be said about &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; for another place (pp. 138-145 <i>infra</i>).&nbsp;
+But I must give the reader a warning.&nbsp; Concerning &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; as a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>or
+pseudonym, Mr. Greenwood says, &ldquo;Some, indeed, would see through
+it, and roundly accuse the player of putting forth the works of others
+as his own.&nbsp; To such he would be a &lsquo;Poet-Ape,&rsquo; or &lsquo;an
+upstart crow&rsquo; (Shake-scene) &lsquo;beautified with the feathers
+of other writers.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation21a"></a><a href="#footnote21a">{21a}</a><br>
+<br>
+If this be true, if &ldquo;some would see through&rdquo; (Mr. Greenwood,
+apparently, means <i>did </i>&ldquo;see through&rdquo;) the &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>the case of the Anti-Willians is promising.&nbsp;
+But, in this matter, Mr. Greenwood <i>se trompe</i>.&nbsp; Neither Greene
+nor Jonson accused &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; or &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo;
+of &ldquo;putting forth the works of others as his own.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That is quite certain, as far as the scorns of Jonson and Greene have
+reached us.&nbsp; (See pp. 141-145 <i>infra</i>.)<br>
+<br>
+If an actor, obviously incapable of wit and poetry, were credited with
+the plays, the keenest curiosity would arise in &ldquo;the profession,&rdquo;
+and among rival playwrights who envied the wealth and &ldquo;glory&rdquo;
+of the actors.&nbsp; This curiosity, prompting the wits and players
+to watch and &ldquo;shadow&rdquo; Will, would, to put it mildly, most
+seriously imperil the secret of the concealed author who had the folly
+to sign himself &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Human nature
+could not rest under such a provocation as the &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo;
+offered.<br>
+<br>
+This is so obvious that had one desired to prove Bacon or the Unknown
+to be the concealed author, one must have credited his mask, Will, with
+abundance of wit and fancy, and, as for learning - with about as much
+as he probably possessed.&nbsp; But the Baconians make him an illiterate
+yokel, and we have quoted Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s estimate of the young
+Warwickshire provincial.<br>
+<br>
+We all have our personal equations in the way of belief.&nbsp; That
+the plot of the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; should have evaded
+discovery for a week, if the actor were the untutored countryman of
+the hypotheses, is to me, for one, absolutely incredible.&nbsp; A &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo; looking about for a &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>and a mask behind which he could be hidden, would not have selected
+the name, or the nearest possible approach to the name, of an ignorant
+unread actor.&nbsp; As he was never suspected of not being the author
+of the plays and poems, Will cannot have been a country ignoramus, manifestly
+incapable of poetry, wit, and such learning as the plays exhibit.&nbsp;
+Every one must judge for himself.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood fervently believes
+in what I disbelieve. <a name="citation22a"></a><a href="#footnote22a">{22a}</a><br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves
+at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays .
+. . &rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood.<br>
+<br>
+Very few care now.&nbsp; They know the actors&rsquo; names: in vain,
+as a rule, do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.&nbsp;
+But in Elizabeth&rsquo;s time the few who cared were apt to care very
+much, and they would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a bookless,
+untaught man, was announced as the author of plays which were among
+the most popular of their day.&nbsp; The seekers never found any other
+author.&nbsp; They left no hint that they suspected the existence of
+any other author.&nbsp; Hence I venture to infer that Will seemed to
+them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite fancy, - no scholar
+to be sure, but very capable of writing the pieces which he fathered.<br>
+<br>
+They may all have been mistaken.&nbsp; Nobody can prove that Heywood
+and Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken.&nbsp;
+But certain it is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable
+of the works which were attributed to him.&nbsp; Therefore he cannot
+possibly have been the man who could not write, of the more impulsive
+Baconians; or the bookless, and probably all but Latinless, man of Mr.
+Greenwood&rsquo;s theory.&nbsp; The positions already seem to me to
+be untenable.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II: THE &ldquo;SILENCE&rdquo; ABOUT SHAKESPEARE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Before proceeding further to examine Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s book, and
+the Baconian theories, with the careful attention which they deserve,
+we must clear the ground by explaining two points which appear to puzzle
+Baconians, though, to be sure, they have their own solutions of the
+problems.<br>
+<br>
+The first question is: Why, considering that Shakespeare, by the consent
+of the learned of most of the polite foreign nations, was one of the
+world&rsquo;s very greatest poets, have we received so few and such
+brief notices of him from the pens of his contemporaries?<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It is wonderful,&rdquo; exclaims Mr. Crouch-Batchelor, &ldquo;that
+hundreds of persons should not have left records of him. <a name="citation27a"></a><a href="#footnote27a">{27a}</a>&nbsp;
+We know nearly as much about the most insignificant writer of the period
+as we know of him, but fifty times more about most of his contemporaries.&nbsp;
+It is senseless to try to account for this otherwise than by recognising
+that the man was not the author.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Crouch-Batchelor is too innocent.&nbsp; He sees the sixteenth century
+in the colours of the twentieth.&nbsp; We know nothing, except a few
+dates of birth, death, entrance at school, College, the Inns of Court,
+and so forth, concerning several of Shakespeare&rsquo;s illustrious
+contemporaries and successors in the art of dramatic poetry.&nbsp; The
+Baconians do not quite understand, or, at least, keep steadily before
+their minds, one immense difference between the Elizabethan age and
+later times.&nbsp; In 1590-1630, there was no public excitement about
+the characters, personalities, and anecdotage of merely literary men,
+poets, and playwrights, who held no position in public affairs, as Spenser
+did; or in Court, Society, and War, as Sidney did; who did not write
+about their own feuds and friendships, like Greene and Nash; who did
+not expand into prefaces and reminiscences, and satires, like Ben Jonson;
+who never killed anybody, as Ben did; nor were killed, like Marlowe;
+nor were involved, like him, in charges of atheism, and so forth; nor
+imprisoned with every chance of having their ears and noses slit, like
+Marston.&nbsp; Consequently, silence and night obscure the lives and
+personalities of Kyd, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dekker, Webster,
+and several others, as night and silence hide Shakespeare from our view.<br>
+<br>
+He was popular on the stage; some of his plays were circulated separately
+in cheap and very perishable quartos.&nbsp; No collected edition of
+his plays appeared during his life; without that he could not be studied,
+and recognised in his greatness.&nbsp; He withdrew to the country and
+died.&nbsp; There was no enthusiastic curiosity about him; nobody Boswellised
+any playwright of his time.&nbsp; The Folio of 1623 gave the first opportunity
+of studying him as alone he can be studied.&nbsp; The Civil Wars and
+the Reign of the Saints distracted men&rsquo;s minds and depressed or
+destroyed the Stage.<br>
+<br>
+Sir William Davenant, a boy when Shakespeare died, used to see the actor
+at his father&rsquo;s inn at Oxford, was interested in him, and cherished
+the embers of the drama, which were fading before the theatres were
+closed.&nbsp; Davenant collected what he could in the way of information
+from old people of the stage; he told Shakespearean anecdotes in conversation;
+a few reached the late day when uncritical inquiries began, say 1680-90
+at earliest.&nbsp; The memories of ancient people of the theatre and
+clerks and sextons at Stratford were ransacked, to very little purpose.<br>
+<br>
+As these things were so, how can we expect biographical materials about
+Shakespeare?&nbsp; As to the man, as to how his character impressed
+contemporaries, we have but the current epithets: &ldquo;friendly,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;gentle,&rdquo; and &ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; the praise of his worth
+by two of the actors in his company (published in 1623), and the brief
+prose note of Ben Jonson, - this is more than we have for the then so
+widely admired Beaumont, Ben Jonson&rsquo;s friend, or Chapman, or the
+adored Fletcher.&nbsp; &ldquo;Into the dark go one and all,&rdquo; Shakespeare
+and the others.&nbsp; To be puzzled by and found theories on the silence
+about Shakespeare is to show an innocence very odd in learned disputants.<br>
+<br>
+The Baconians, as usual, make a puzzle and a mystery out of their own
+misappreciation of the literary and social conditions of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+time.&nbsp; That world could not possibly appreciate his works as we
+do; the world, till 1623, possessed only a portion of his plays in cheap
+pamphlets, in several of these his text was mangled and in places unintelligible.&nbsp;
+And in not a single instance were anecdotes and biographical traits
+of playwrights recorded, except when the men published matter about
+themselves, or when they became notorious in some way unconnected with
+their literary works.&nbsp; Drummond, in Scotland, made brief notes
+of Ben Jonson&rsquo;s talk; Shakespeare he never met.<br>
+<br>
+That age was not widely and enthusiastically appreciative of literary
+merit in playwrights who were merely dramatists, and in no other way
+notorious or eminent.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood justly says &ldquo;the contemporary
+eulogies of the poet afford proof that there were some cultured critics
+of that day of sufficient taste and acumen to recognise, or partly recognise,
+his excellence . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation30a"></a><a href="#footnote30a">{30a}</a>&nbsp;
+(Here I omit some words, presently to be restored to the text.)&nbsp;
+From such critics the poet received such applause as has reached us.
+We also know that the plays were popular; but the audiences have not
+rushed to pen and ink to record their satisfaction.&nbsp; With them,
+as with all audiences, the actors and the <i>spectacle</i>,<i> </i>much
+more than the &ldquo;cackle,&rdquo; were the attractions.&nbsp; When
+Dr. Ingleby says that &ldquo;the bard of our admiration was unknown
+to the men of that age,&rdquo; he uses hyperbole, and means, I presume,
+that he was unknown, as all authors are, to the great majority; and
+that those who knew him in part made no modern fuss about him. <a name="citation31a"></a><a href="#footnote31a">{31a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The second puzzle is, - Why did Shakespeare, conscious of his great
+powers, never secure for his collected plays the permanence of print
+and publication?&nbsp; We cannot be sure that he and his company, in
+fact, did not provide publishers with the copy for the better Quartos
+or pamphlets of separate plays, as Mr. Pollard argues on good grounds
+that they sometimes did. <a name="citation31b"></a><a href="#footnote31b">{31b}</a>&nbsp;
+For the rest, no dramatic author edited a complete edition of his works
+before Ben Jonson, a scholarly man, set the example in the year of Shakespeare&rsquo;s,
+and of Beaumont&rsquo;s death (1616).&nbsp; Neither Beaumont nor Fletcher
+collected and published their works for the Stage.&nbsp; The idea was
+unheard of before Jonson set the example, and much of his work lay unprinted
+till years after his death. We must remember the conditions of play-writing
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s time.<br>
+<br>
+There were then many poets of no mean merit, all capable of admirable
+verse on occasion; and in various degrees possessed of the lofty, vigorous,
+and vivid style of that great age.&nbsp; The theatre, and writing for
+the theatre, afforded to many men of talent a means of livelihood analogous
+to that offered by journalism among ourselves.&nbsp; They were apt to
+work collectively, several hands hurrying out a single play; and in
+twos or threes, or fours or fives, they often collaborated.<br>
+<br>
+As a general rule a play when finished was sold by the author or authors
+to a company of players, or to a speculator like the notorious Philip
+Henslowe, and the new owners, &ldquo;the grand possessors,&rdquo; were
+usually averse to the publication of the work, lest other companies
+might act it.&nbsp; The plays were primarily written to be acted.&nbsp;
+The company in possession could have the play altered as they pleased
+by a literary man in their employment.<br>
+<br>
+To follow Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s summary of the situation &ldquo;it would
+seem that an author could restrain any person from publishing his manuscript,
+or could bring an action against him for so doing, so long as he had
+not disposed of his right to it; and that the publisher could prevent
+any other publisher from issuing the work.&nbsp; At the same time it
+is clear that the law was frequently violated . . . whether because
+of the difficulty of enforcing it, or through the supineness of authors;
+and that in consequence authors were frequently defrauded by surreptitious
+copies of their works being issued by piratical publishers.&rdquo; <a name="citation33a"></a><a href="#footnote33a">{33a}</a><br>
+<br>
+It may appear that to &ldquo;authors&rdquo; we should, in the case of
+plays, add &ldquo;owners,&rdquo; such as theatrical companies, for no
+case is cited in which such a company brings an action against the publisher
+of a play which they own.&nbsp; The two players of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+company who sign the preface to the first edition of his collected plays
+(1623, &ldquo;The First Folio&rdquo;) complain that &ldquo;divers stolen
+and surreptitious copies&rdquo; of single plays have been put forth,
+&ldquo;maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+They speak as if they were unable to prevent, or had not the energy
+to prevent, these frauds.&nbsp; In the accounts of the aforesaid Henslowe,
+we find him paying forty shillings to a printer to stop or &ldquo;stay&rdquo;
+the printing of a play, <i>Patient Grizel</i>,<i> </i>by three of his
+hacks.<br>
+<br>
+We perhaps come across an effort of the company to prevent or delay
+the publication of <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>,<i> </i>on July 17,
+1598, in the <i>Stationers</i>&rsquo;<i> Register</i>.&nbsp; James Robertes,
+and all other printers, are forbidden to print the book without previous
+permission from the Lord Chamberlain, the protector of Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+company.&nbsp; Two years passed before Robertes issued the book. <a name="citation34a"></a><a href="#footnote34a">{34a}</a>&nbsp;
+As is well known, Heywood, a most prolific playwright, boasts that he
+never made a double sale of his pieces to the players and the press.&nbsp;
+Others occasionally did, which Heywood clearly thought less than honest.<br>
+<br>
+As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his company,
+Will&rsquo;s interests were the same as theirs.&nbsp; It is therefore
+curious that some of his pieces were early printed, in quartos, from
+very good copies; while others appeared in very bad copies, clearly
+surreptitious.&nbsp; Probably the company gave a good MS. copy, sometimes,
+to a printer who offered satisfactory terms, after the gloss of novelty
+was off the acted play. <a name="citation34b"></a><a href="#footnote34b">{34b}</a>&nbsp;
+In any case, we see that the custom and interests of the owners of manuscript
+plays ran contrary to their early publication.&nbsp; In 1619 even Ben
+Jonson, who loved publication, told Drummond that half of his comedies
+were still unprinted.<br>
+<br>
+These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by ours.&nbsp;
+Whoever wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon;
+whoever legally owned the manuscripts, was equally incurious and negligent
+about the preservation of a correct text.&nbsp; As we shall see later,
+while Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself edited,
+or gave to Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first collected edition
+(1623), the work has been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless
+manner, and, as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly states, the edition, in his
+opinion, contains at least two plays not by his &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+- that &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; - and masses of &ldquo;non-Shakespearean&rdquo;
+work.<br>
+<br>
+How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either revised
+the plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an Editor as Ben
+Jonson, I cannot imagine.&nbsp; This is also one of the difficulties
+in Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s theory.&nbsp; Thus we cannot argue, &ldquo;if
+the actor were the author, he must have been conscious of his great
+powers.&nbsp; Therefore the actor cannot have been the author, for the
+actor wholly neglected to collect his printed and to print his manuscript
+works.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the plays
+by Bacon.&nbsp; He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished till 1623.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;But he could not avow his authorship,&rdquo; cry Baconians, giving
+various exquisite reasons.&nbsp; Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he
+might not care to divulge his long association with &ldquo;a cry of
+players,&rdquo; and a man like Will of Stratford.&nbsp; But he had no
+occasion to avow it.&nbsp; He had merely to suggest to the players,
+through any safe channel, that they should collect and publish the works
+of their old friend Will Shakspere.<br>
+<br>
+Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he were actor
+or statesman; and the actor, at least, is not to blame for the chaos
+of the first collected edition, made while he was in his grave, and
+while Bacon was busy in revising and superintending Latin translations
+of his works on scientific subjects.<br>
+<br>
+We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of Shakspere
+the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was extreme, whether
+or not he were the author.&nbsp; The neglect was characteristic of the
+playwrights of his own and the next generation.&nbsp; In those days
+it was no marvel; few cared.&nbsp; Nine years passed before a second
+edition of the collected plays appeared: thirty-two years went by before
+a third edition was issued - years of war and tumult, yet they saw the
+posthumous publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.<br>
+<br>
+There remains one more mystery connected with publication.&nbsp; When
+the first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain
+&ldquo;All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp; According
+to the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by
+Jonson acting for him.&nbsp; It contains several plays which, according
+to many critics, are not the author&rsquo;s.&nbsp; This, if true, is
+mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays were published, as by
+Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor and of Bacon; plays which
+neither acknowledged for his own, for we hear of no remonstrance from
+- whoever &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; was.&nbsp; It is impossible
+for me to say why there was no remonstrance.<br>
+<br>
+Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon&rsquo;s plays, under his own
+name, with a slight difference in spelling, to his company.&nbsp; It
+was as much his interest, in that case, to protest when Bacon&rsquo;s
+pen-name was taken in vain, as if he had spelled his own surname with
+an <i>a </i>in the second syllable.<br>
+<br>
+There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice. <a name="citation37a"></a><a href="#footnote37a">{37a}</a>&nbsp;
+In 1599 Jaggard published &ldquo;<i>The Passionate Pilgrim; </i>W. Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Out of twenty poems, five only were by W. S.&nbsp; In 1612, Jaggard
+added two poems by Tom Heywood, retaining W. Shakespeare&rsquo;s name
+as sole author.&nbsp; &ldquo;Heywood protested&rdquo; in print, &ldquo;and
+stated that <i>Shakespeare </i>was offended, and,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood,
+&ldquo;very probably he was so; but as he was, so I conceive, &lsquo;a
+concealed poet,&rsquo; writing under a <i>nom de plume</i>,<i> </i>he
+seems to have only made known his annoyance through the medium of Heywood.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was.&nbsp; Turning to pp.
+348, 349, we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story, with this
+addition, that the author of the poems published by Jaggard, &ldquo;to
+do himself right, hath since published them in his own name.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That is, W. Shakespeare has since published under his own name such
+pieces of <i>The Passionate Pilgrim </i>as are his own.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+author, I know,&rdquo; adds Heywood, &ldquo;was much offended with Mr.
+Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with
+his name.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published W. S.&rsquo;s
+poems with others <i>not </i>by W. S.?<br>
+<br>
+How can anyone explain, by any theory?&nbsp; It was as open to him in
+1599 as in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own name, or pen-name.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Here we observe,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation38a"></a><a href="#footnote38a">{38a}</a>
+&ldquo;that Heywood does nothing to identify &lsquo;the author with
+the player.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; This is, we shall see, the eternal argument.&nbsp;
+Why should Heywood, speaking of W. Shakespeare, explain what all the
+world knew?&nbsp; There was no other W. Shakespeare (with or without
+the <i>e </i>and <i>a</i>)<i> </i>but one, the actor, in the world of
+letters of Elizabeth and James.&nbsp; Who the author was Heywood himself
+has told us, elsewhere: the author was - Will!<br>
+<br>
+But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name, or, when
+he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or anyone to explain.&nbsp;
+We do not know the nature of the circumstances in detail; we do not
+know that the poet saw hopes of stopping the sale of the works falsely
+attributed to him.&nbsp; I do not even feel certain that he had not
+a finger in some of them.&nbsp; Knowing so little, a more soaring wit
+than mine might fly to the explanation that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+was the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo; of Bacon or his unknown equivalent,
+and that he preferred to &ldquo;let sleeping dogs lie,&rdquo; or, as
+Mr. Greenwood might quote the Latin tag, said <i>ne moveas Camarinam.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>CHAPTER III: THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE - THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The banner-cry of the Baconians is the word &ldquo;Impossible!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It is impossible that the actor from Stratford (as they think of him,
+a bookless, untutored lad, speaking in <i>patois</i>)<i> </i>should
+have possessed the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by
+the author of the plays and poems.&nbsp; It is impossible that at the
+little Free School of Stratford (if he attended it), he should have
+gained his wide knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome.&nbsp;
+To these arguments, the orthodox Stratfordian is apt to reply, that
+he finds in the plays and poems plenty of inaccurate general information
+on classical subjects, information in which the whole literature of
+England then abounded.&nbsp; He also finds in the plays some knowledge
+of certain Latin authors, which cannot be proved to have been translated
+at the date when Shakespeare drew on them.&nbsp; How much Latin Shakespeare
+knew, in our opinion, will presently be explained.<br>
+<br>
+But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must say that
+while the author of the plays had some lore which scholars also possessed,
+he did not use his knowledge like a scholar.&nbsp; We do not see how
+a scholar could make, as the scansion of his blank verse proves that
+the author did make, the second syllable of the name of Posthumus, in
+<i>Cymbeline</i>,<i> long.&nbsp; </i>He must have read a famous line
+in Horace thus,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>Eheu fugaces Posthoome, Posthoome</i>!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+which could scarce &lsquo;scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School.&nbsp;
+In the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus short,
+equally impossible.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i>
+</i>but also appears to credit it to him, as one of the older plays
+which he &ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed,&rdquo; <a name="citation44a"></a><a href="#footnote44a">{44a}</a>
+and <i>that </i>is taken to have been all his &ldquo;authorship&rdquo;
+in several cases.&nbsp; A scholar would have corrected, not accepted,
+false quantities.&nbsp; In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans cite
+Plato and Aristotle in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,<i> </i>while Plato
+and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest conceivable
+date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose that a scholar
+would have permitted to himself the freak, any more than that in <i>The
+Winter</i>&rsquo;<i>s Tale </i>he should have borrowed from an earlier
+novel the absurdity of calling Delphi &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; (a non-existent
+word), of confusing &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; with Delos, and placing the
+Delphian Oracle in an island.&nbsp; In the same play the author, quite
+needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492-1546) contemporary
+with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian Apollo.&nbsp;
+This, at least, would not be ignorance.<br>
+<br>
+We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben&rsquo;s inability to refrain
+from gibes at Shakspere&rsquo;s want of scholarship.&nbsp; Rowe, who
+had traditions of Davenant&rsquo;s, tells how, in conversation with
+Suckling, Davenant, Endymion Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on
+Will&rsquo;s want of learning; and how Hales snubbed him.&nbsp; Indeed,
+Ben could have made mirth enough out of <i>The Winter</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Tale</i>.&nbsp; For, granting to Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation45a"></a><a href="#footnote45a">{45a}</a>
+that &ldquo;the mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of a much earlier
+date, and under the reign of Ottocar (1255-78) Bohemia extended from
+the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic,&rdquo; that only makes matters
+far worse.&nbsp; &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo; never was a place-name; there
+was no oracle on the isle of &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo;; there were no Oracles
+in 1255-78 (A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat for her portrait
+to Giulio Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at <i>Delphos</i>,<i>
+</i>but not with Ottocar.<br>
+<br>
+There never was so mad a mixture, not even in <i>Ivanhoe; </i>not even
+in <i>Kenilworth</i>.&nbsp; Scott erred deliberately, as he says in
+his prefaces; but Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene,
+inserted Giulio Romano &ldquo;for his personal diversion,&rdquo; never
+heard of Ottocar (no more than I), and made a delightful congeries of
+errors in gaiety of heart.&nbsp; Nobody shall convince me that Francis
+Bacon was so charmingly irresponsible; but I cannot speak so confidently
+of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Great Unknown, a severe scholar, but perhaps
+a frisky soul.&nbsp; There was no region called Bohemia when the Delphic
+oracle was in vigour; - this apology (apparently contrived by Sir Edward
+Sullivan) is the most comic of erudite reflections.<br>
+<br>
+Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita, concerning
+the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was carried off by Dis.&nbsp;
+How could she, brought up in the hut of a Bohemian shepherd, know anything
+of the Rape of Proserpine?&nbsp; Why not, as she lived in the days of
+the Delphic Oracle - and Giulio Romano, and of printed ballads.<br>
+<br>
+It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer, brought up
+among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire, should have created
+the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and known the style of his
+Armado; and understood how dukes and kings talk among themselves - usually
+in blank verse, it appears.<br>
+<br>
+It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard of the
+&ldquo;obscure&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>!)<i> </i>Court of Navarre; and known
+that at Venice there was a place called the Rialto, and a &ldquo;common
+ferry&rdquo; called &ldquo;the tranect.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is impossible
+that he should have had &ldquo;an intimate knowledge of the castle of
+Elsinore,&rdquo; though an English <i>troupe </i>of actors visited Denmark
+in 1587.&nbsp; To Will all this knowledge was <i>impossible; </i>for
+these and many more exquisite reasons the yokel&rsquo;s authorship of
+the plays is a physical impossibility.&nbsp; But scholars neither invent
+nor tolerate such strange liberties with time and place, with history,
+geography, and common sense.&nbsp; Will Shakspere either did not know
+what was right, or, more probably, did not care, and supposed, like
+Fielding in the old anecdote, that the audience &ldquo;would not find
+it out.&rdquo;&nbsp; How could a scholar do any of these things?&nbsp;
+He was as incapable of them as Ben Jonson.&nbsp; Such sins no scholar
+is inclined to; they have, for him, no temptations.<br>
+<br>
+As to Shakspere&rsquo;s schooling, the Baconians point at the current
+ignorance of Stratford-on-Avon, where many topping burgesses, even aldermen,
+&ldquo;made their marks,&rdquo; in place of signing their names to documents.&nbsp;
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s father, wife, and daughter &ldquo;made their marks,&rdquo;
+in place of signing.&nbsp; So did Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of the
+Earl of Huntly, when she married the cultivated Earl of Bothwell (1566).<br>
+<br>
+There is no evidence, from a roll of schoolboys at Stratford Free Grammar
+School, about 1564-77, that any given boy attended it; for no roll exists.&nbsp;
+Consequently there is no evidence that Will was a pupil.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;In the Appendix to Malone&rsquo;s <i>Life of Shakespeare </i>will
+be found two Latin letters, written by alumni of Stratford School contemporary
+with Shakespeare,&rdquo; says Mr. Collins. <a name="citation48a"></a><a href="#footnote48a">{48a}</a>&nbsp;
+But though the writers were Stratford boys contemporary with Shakespeare,
+in later life his associates, as there is no roll of pupils&rsquo; names
+how do we know, the Baconians may ask, that these men were educated
+at Stratford School?&nbsp; Why not at Winchester, Eton, St. Paul&rsquo;s,
+or anywhere?&nbsp; Need one reply?<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Collins goes on, in his simple confiding way, to state that &ldquo;one
+letter is by Abraham Sturley, afterwards an alderman of Stratford .
+. . &rdquo;&nbsp; Pursuing the facts, we find that Sturley wrote in
+Latin to &ldquo;Richard Quiney, Shakespeare&rsquo;s friend,&rdquo; who,
+if he could read Sturley&rsquo;s letter, could read Latin.&nbsp; Then
+<i>young </i>Richard Quiney, apparently aged eleven, wrote in Latin
+to his father.&nbsp; If young Richard Quiney be the son of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+friend, Richard Quiney, then, of course, his Latin at the age of eleven
+would only prove that, if he were a schoolboy at Stratford, <i>one </i>Stratford
+boy could write Latin in the generation following that of Shakespeare.&nbsp;
+Thus may reason the Baconians.<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps, however, we may say that if Stratford boys contemporary with
+Shakspere, in his own rank and known to him, learned Latin, which they
+retained in manhood, Shakspere, if he went to school with them, may
+have done as much.<br>
+<br>
+Concerning the school, a Free Grammar School, we know that during Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+boyhood the Mastership was not disdained by Walter Roche, perhaps a
+Fellow of what was then the most progressive College in learning of
+those at Oxford, namely, Corpus Christi.&nbsp; That Shakespeare could
+have been his pupil is uncertain; the dates are rather difficult.&nbsp;
+I think it probable that he was not, and we do not know the qualifications
+of the two or three succeeding Masters.<br>
+<br>
+As to the methods of teaching and the books read at Grammar Schools,
+abundance of information has been collected.&nbsp; We know what the
+use was in one very good school, Ipswich, from 1528; in another in 1611;
+but as we do not possess any special information about Stratford School,
+Mr. Greenwood opposes the admission of evidence from other academies.&nbsp;
+A man might think that, however much the quality of the teaching varied
+in various free schools, the nominal curriculum would be fairly uniform.<br>
+<br>
+As to the teacher, a good endowment would be apt to attract a capable
+man.&nbsp; What was the endowment of Stratford School?&nbsp; It was
+derived from the bequest of Thomas Jolyffe (died 1482), a bequest of
+lands in Stratford and Dodwell, and before the Reformation the Brethren
+of the Guild were &ldquo;to find a priest fit and able in knowledge
+to teach grammar freely to all scholars coming to him, taking nothing
+for their teaching . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;The Founder&rsquo;s liberal
+endowment made it possible to secure an income for the Master by deed.&nbsp;
+Under the Reformation, Somerset&rsquo;s Commission found that the School
+Master had &pound;10 yearly by patent; the school was well conducted,
+and was not confiscated.&rdquo; <a name="citation50a"></a><a href="#footnote50a">{50a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Baconians can compare the yearly &pound;20 (the salary in 1570-6, which
+then went much further than it does now) with the incomes of other masters
+of Grammar Schools, and thereby find out if the Head-Master was very
+cheap.&nbsp; Mr. Elton (who knew his subject intimately) calls the provision
+&ldquo;liberal.&rdquo;&nbsp; The Head-Master of Westminster had &pound;20
+and a house.<br>
+<br>
+As to the method of teaching, it was colloquial; questions were asked
+and answered in Latin.&nbsp; This method, according to Dr. Rouse of
+Perse School, brings boys on much more rapidly than does our current
+fashion, as may readily be imagined; but experts vary in opinion.&nbsp;
+The method, I conceive, should give a pupil a vocabulary.&nbsp; Lilly&rsquo;s
+Latin Grammar was universally used, and was learned by rote, as by George
+Borrow, in the last century.&nbsp; See <i>Lavengro </i>for details.&nbsp;
+Conversation books, <i>Sententi&aelig; Pueriles</i>,<i> </i>were in
+use; with easy books, such as Corderius&rsquo;s <i>Colloquia</i>,<i>
+</i>and so on, for boys were taught to <i>speak </i>Latin, the common
+language of the educated in Europe.&nbsp; Waifs of the Armada, Spaniards
+wrecked on the Irish coast, met &ldquo;a savage who knew Latin,&rdquo;
+and thus could converse with him.&nbsp; The Eclogues of Mantuanus, a
+Latin poet of the Renaissance (the &ldquo;Old Mantuan&rdquo; of <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>),<i> </i>were used, with Erasmus&rsquo;s
+<i>Colloquia</i>,<i> </i>and, says Mr. Collins, &ldquo;such books as
+Ovid&rsquo;s Metamorphoses&rdquo; (and other works of his), &ldquo;the
+&AElig;neid, selected comedies of Terence and Plautus, and portions
+of C&aelig;sar, Sallust, Cicero, and Livy.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Pro-di-gi-ous!&rdquo; exclaims Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation51a"></a><a href="#footnote51a">{51a}</a>
+referring to what Mr. Collins says Will had read at school.&nbsp; But
+precocious Latinity was not thought &ldquo;prodigious&rdquo; in an age
+when nothing but Latin was taught to boys - not even cricket.&nbsp;
+Nor is it to be supposed that every boy read in all of these authors,
+still less read all of their works, but these were the works of which
+portions were read.&nbsp; It is not prodigious.&nbsp; I myself, according
+to my class-master, was &ldquo;a bad and careless little boy&rdquo;
+at thirteen, incurably idle, but I well remember reading in Ovid and
+C&aelig;sar, and Sallust, while the rest of my time was devoted to the
+total neglect of the mathematics, English &ldquo;as she was taught,&rdquo;
+History, and whatsoever else was expected from me.&nbsp; Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+time was not thus frittered away; Latin was all he learned (if he went
+to school), and, as he was (on my theory) a very clever, imaginative
+kind of boy, I can conceive that he was intensely interested in the
+stories told by Ovid, and in Catiline&rsquo;s Conspiracy (thrilling,
+if you know your Sallust); and if his interest were once aroused, he
+would make rapid progress.&nbsp; My own early hatred of Greek was hissing
+and malignant, but as soon as I opened Homer, all was changed.&nbsp;
+One was intensely interested!<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood will not, in the matter of books, go beyond Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps,
+<a name="citation52a"></a><a href="#footnote52a">{52a}</a> &ldquo;Lilly&rsquo;s
+Grammar, and a few classical works chained to the desks of the free
+schools.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins himself gives but &ldquo;a few classical
+books,&rdquo; of which <i>portions </i>were read.&nbsp; The chains were
+in all the free schools, if Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps is right.&nbsp;
+The chains, if authentic, do not count as objections.<br>
+<br>
+Here it must be noted that Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s opinion of Will&rsquo;s
+knowledge and attainments is not easily to be ascertained with precision.&nbsp;
+He sees, of course, that the pretension of the extreme Baconians - Will
+could not even write his name - is absurd.&nbsp; If he could not write,
+he could not pass as the author.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood &ldquo;fears that
+the arguments&rdquo; (of a most extreme Baconian) &ldquo;would drive
+many wandering sheep back to the Stratfordian fold.&rdquo; <a name="citation52b"></a><a href="#footnote52b">{52b}</a><br>
+<br>
+He has therefore to find a <i>via media</i>,<i> </i>to present, as the
+pseudo-author, a Will who possessed neither books nor manuscripts when
+he made his Testament; a rustic, bookless Will, speaking a patois, who
+could none the less pass himself off as the author.&nbsp; So &ldquo;I
+think it highly probable,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;that he
+attended the Grammar School at Stratford for four or five years, and
+that, later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able
+to &lsquo;bumbast out a line,&rsquo; and perhaps to pose as &lsquo;Poet-Ape
+who would be thought our chief.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation53a"></a><a href="#footnote53a">{53a}</a>&nbsp;
+Again, &ldquo;He had had but little schooling; he had &lsquo;small Latin
+and less Greek&rsquo;; but he was a good <i>Johannes Factotum</i>,<i>
+</i>he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, &lsquo;bumbast out
+a blank verse.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation53b"></a><a href="#footnote53b">{53b}</a><br>
+<br>
+But this is almost to abandon Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s case.&nbsp; Will
+appears to me to be now perilously near acceptance as Greene&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Shake-scene,&rdquo; who was a formidable rival to Greene&rsquo;s
+three professional playwrights: and quite as near to Ben&rsquo;s Poet-Ape
+&ldquo;that would be thought our chief,&rdquo; who began by re-making
+old plays; then won &ldquo;some little wealth and credit on the scene,&rdquo;
+who had his &ldquo;works&rdquo; printed (for Ben expects them to reach
+posterity), and whom Ben accused of plagiarism from himself and his
+contemporaries.&nbsp; But this Shake-scene, this Poet-Ape, is merely
+our Will Shakespeare as described by bitterly jealous and envious rivals.&nbsp;
+Where are now the &ldquo;works&rdquo; of &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; if they
+are not the works of Shakespeare which Ben so nobly applauded later,
+if they are not in the blank verse of Greene&rsquo;s Shake-scene?&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays&rdquo; we call them.<br>
+<br>
+<i>When </i>was it &ldquo;necessary&rdquo; for the &ldquo;Stratford
+rustic&rdquo; to &ldquo;bumbast out a blank verse&rdquo;?&nbsp; Where
+are the blank verses which he bumbasted out?&nbsp; For what purposes
+were they bumbasted?&nbsp; By 1592 &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; was ambitious,
+and thought his blank verse as good as the best that Greene&rsquo;s
+friends, including Marlowe, could write.&nbsp; He had plenty of time
+to practise before the date when, as Ben wrote, &ldquo;he would be thought
+our chief.&rdquo;&nbsp; He would not cease to do that in which he conceived
+himself to excel; to write for the stage.<br>
+<br>
+When once Mr. Greenwood deems it &ldquo;highly probable&rdquo; that
+Will had four or five years of education at a Latin school, Will has
+as much of &ldquo;grounding&rdquo; in Latin, I think, as would account
+for all the knowledge of the Roman tongue which he displays.&nbsp; His
+amount of teaching at school would carry and tempt even a boy who was
+merely clever, and loved to read romantic tales and comic plays, into
+Ovid and Plautus - English books being to him not very accessible.<br>
+<br>
+Here I may speak from my own memories, for though utterly idle where
+set school tasks were concerned, I tried very early to worry the sense
+out of Aristophanes - because he was said to contain good reading.<br>
+<br>
+To this amount of taste and curiosity, nowise unexampled in an ordinary
+clever boy, add <i>Genius</i>,<i> </i>and I feel no difficulty as to
+Will&rsquo;s &ldquo;learning,&rdquo; such as, at best, it was.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The Stratfordian,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;will ingeminate
+&lsquo;Genius!&nbsp; Genius!&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation55a"></a><a href="#footnote55a">{55a}</a>&nbsp;
+I <i>do </i>say &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; and stand by it.&nbsp; The ordinary
+clever boy, in the supposed circumstances, could read and admire his
+Ovid (though Shakespeare used cribs also), the man of genius could write
+<i>Venus and Adonis.<br>
+<br>
+</i>Had I to maintain the Baconian hypothesis, I would not weigh heavily
+on bookless Will&rsquo;s rusticity and patois.&nbsp; Accepting Ben Jonson&rsquo;s
+account of his &ldquo;excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
+expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility . . <i>. </i>,&rdquo;<i>
+</i>accepting the tradition of his lively wit; admitting that he had
+some Latin and literature, I would find in him a sufficiently plausible
+mask for that immense Unknown with a strange taste for furbishing up
+older plays.&nbsp; I would merely deny to Will his <i>genius</i>,<i>
+</i>and hand <i>that </i>over to Bacon - or Bungay.&nbsp; Believe me,
+Mr. Greenwood, this is your easiest way! - perhaps this <i>is </i>your
+way? - the plot of the unscrupulous Will, and of your astute Bungay,
+might thus more conceivably escape detection from the pack of envious
+playwrights.<br>
+<br>
+According to &ldquo;all tradition,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, Shakespeare
+was taken from school at the age of thirteen.&nbsp; Those late long-descended
+traditions of Shakespeare&rsquo;s youth are of little value as evidence;
+but, if it pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument,
+accept the whole of them.&nbsp; Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose
+among the traditions: all depends on the genealogical steps by which
+they reach us, as far as these can be discovered. <a name="citation56a"></a><a href="#footnote56a">{56a}</a><br>
+<br>
+According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680,
+an opinion concerning Shakspere&rsquo;s education reached him.&nbsp;
+It came thus; there had been an actor in Shakspere&rsquo;s company,
+one Phillips, who, dying in 1605, left to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling
+piece of gold; and the same &ldquo;to my servant, Christopher Beeston.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Christopher&rsquo;s son, William, in 1640, became deputy to Davenant
+in the management of &ldquo;the King&rsquo;s and Queen&rsquo;s Young
+Company&rdquo;, and through Beeston, according to Aubrey, Davenant learned;
+through Beeston Aubrey learned, that Shakespeare &ldquo;understood Latin
+pretty well, for he had been in his younger days a school-master in
+the country.&rdquo;&nbsp; Aubrey writes that &ldquo;old Mr. Beeston,
+whom Mr. Dryden calls &lsquo;the chronicle of the stage,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+died in 1682. <a name="citation56b"></a><a href="#footnote56b">{56b}</a><br>
+<br>
+This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions.&nbsp; Phillips,
+a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher
+Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682;
+he is &ldquo;the chronicle of the stage.&rdquo;&nbsp; Through him Davenant
+gets the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere &ldquo;knew
+Latin pretty well,&rdquo; and had been a rural dominie.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+<a name="citation57a"></a><a href="#footnote57a">{57a}</a> devotes much
+space to disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority,
+<i>moult s</i>&rsquo;<i>en faut</i>),<i> </i>but Mr. Greenwood here
+says not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition.&nbsp;
+He frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration
+than I like.&nbsp; He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p.
+105, but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say
+that &ldquo;Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his
+authority.&rdquo;&nbsp; On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does
+not suit his book) as &ldquo;a mere myth.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>He
+</i>knows, <i>he </i>knows&rdquo; which traditions are mythical, and
+which possess a certain historical value.<br>
+<br>
+My own opinion is that Shakspere did &ldquo;know Latin pretty well,&rdquo;
+and was no <i>scholar</i>,<i> </i>as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship.&nbsp;
+He left school, if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age,
+twelve, when Bacon went to Cambridge.&nbsp; Will, a clever kind of lad
+(on my theory), left school at an age when some other clever lads became
+freshmen.&nbsp; Why not?&nbsp; Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have
+heard as Bishop of Salisbury under William III) took his degree at the
+age of fourteen.<br>
+<br>
+Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing
+to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I conceive
+him to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be found the
+most wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which could not but
+please his &ldquo;green unknowing youth.&rdquo;&nbsp; In the years before
+he left Stratford, and after he left school (1577-87?), I can easily
+suppose that he was not <i>always </i>butchering calves, poaching, and
+making love; and that, if he could get books in no other way, this graceless
+fellow might be detected on a summer evening, knitting his brows over
+the stories and jests of the chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom
+desk.&nbsp; <i>Moi qui parle</i>,<i> </i>I am no genius; but stories,
+romance, and humour would certainly have dragged me back to the old
+desks - if better might not be, and why not Shakspere?&nbsp; Put yourself
+in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad, you liked
+to steal away into the world of romance, into fairyland.<br>
+<br>
+If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was
+a marvel of genius.&nbsp; But I am not here claiming for him genius,
+but merely stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and romance,
+had no English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired as much
+power of reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily gain in
+four years of exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies
+as he pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.<br>
+<br>
+I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist;
+if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin
+school.&nbsp; I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt
+acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of
+the plays must have possessed in youth.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tradition says
+nothing of all that,&rdquo; the Baconian answers, and he may now, if
+he likes, turn to my reply in <i>The Traditional Shakespeare</i>. <a name="citation59a"></a><a href="#footnote59a">{59a}</a>&nbsp;
+Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after
+date, in a place where literature was <i>not </i>of supreme interest,
+to retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did),
+in circumstances of privacy?&nbsp; As far as I am able to judge, had
+I been a boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing
+but Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and
+romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I
+suppose Shakspere to have possessed.&nbsp; Yet I could scarcely, like
+him, have made the second syllable in &ldquo;Posthumus&rdquo; long!&nbsp;
+Sir Walter Scott, however, was guilty of similar false quantities: he
+and Shakspere were about equally scholarly.<br>
+<br>
+I suppose, then, that Shakspere&rsquo;s &ldquo;small Latin&rdquo; (as
+Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks;
+to read sufficient for his uses.&nbsp; As a fact, he made use of English
+translations, and also of Latin texts.&nbsp; Scholars like Bacon do
+not use bad translations of easy Latin authors.&nbsp; If Bacon wanted
+Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation
+of a French translation of a Latin translation.<br>
+<br>
+Some works of Shakespeare, the <i>Lucrece</i>,<i> </i>for example, and
+<i>The Comedy of Errors </i>(if he were not working over an earlier
+canvas from a more learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge
+of Latin texts which in his day had not appeared in published translations,
+or had not been translated at all as far as we know.&nbsp; In my opinion
+Will had Latin enough to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult,
+for himself.&nbsp; He could also &ldquo;get a construe,&rdquo; when
+in London, or help in reading, from a more academic acquaintance: or
+buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor scholar.&nbsp; No contemporary
+calls him scholarly; the generation of men who were small boys when
+he died held him for no scholar.&nbsp; The current English literature
+of his day was saturated with every kind of classical information; its
+readers, even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world of lore with
+which the modern man is seldom acquainted.&nbsp; The ignorant Baconian
+marvels: the classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with
+Elizabethan literature is amazed.&nbsp; Really there is nothing worthy
+of their wonder.<br>
+<br>
+Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him &ldquo;<i>learned</i>&rdquo;?&nbsp;
+He is &ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; &ldquo;honey-tongued,&rdquo; &ldquo;mellifluous,&rdquo;
+and so forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with
+the compliment of &ldquo;learned.&rdquo;&nbsp; What Ben Jonson thought
+of his learning (but Ben&rsquo;s standard was very high), what Milton
+and Fuller, boys of eight when he died, thought of his learning, we
+know.&nbsp; They thought him &ldquo;Fancy&rsquo;s child&rdquo; (Milton)
+and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with &ldquo;small Latin
+and less Greek&rdquo; (Jonson).&nbsp; They speak of Shakespeare the
+author and actor; not yet had any man divided the persons.<br>
+<br>
+Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the classics.&nbsp;
+They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense as our modern
+scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr. Swinburne among the
+dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray - if I may be pardoned
+for mentioning contemporary names.&nbsp; But Elizabethan scholarly poets,
+and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned.&nbsp; Perhaps few
+modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them.&nbsp; The opinion
+of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+scholarship &ldquo;inexact,&rdquo; as we shall see.<br>
+<br>
+I conceive that Shakspere &ldquo;knew Latin pretty well,&rdquo; and,
+on Ben Jonson&rsquo;s evidence, he knew &ldquo;less Greek.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That he knew <i>any </i>Greek is surprising.&nbsp; Apparently he did,
+to judge from Ben&rsquo;s words.&nbsp; My attitude must, to the Baconians,
+seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive.&nbsp; I cannot pretend to know
+what was Shakspere&rsquo;s precise amount of proficiency in Latin when
+he was writing the plays.&nbsp; That between his own knowledge, and
+construes given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the
+Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood says &ldquo;the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere
+must have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free
+School is positively amazing.&rdquo; <a name="citation62a"></a><a href="#footnote62a">{62a}</a>&nbsp;
+But I have shown how an imaginative boy, with little or no access to
+English poetry and romances, might continue to read Latin &ldquo;for
+human pleasure&rdquo; after he left school.&nbsp; As a professional
+writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they are rare
+in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in his reading.&nbsp;
+Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of genius.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this prodigious
+industry. . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; I am not speaking of &ldquo;prodigious
+industry,&rdquo; and of that - at school.&nbsp; In a region so non-literary
+as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr. Greenwood ought not to expect
+traditions of Will&rsquo;s early reading (even if he studied much more
+deeply than I have supposed) to exist, from fifty to seventy years after
+Will was dead, in the memories of the sons and grandsons of country
+people who cared for none of these things.&nbsp; The thing is not reasonable.
+<a name="citation62b"></a><a href="#footnote62b">{62b}</a><br>
+<br>
+Let me take one example <a name="citation62c"></a><a href="#footnote62c">{62c}</a>
+of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s debt to Seneca&rsquo;s then untranslated paper <i>De
+Clementia </i>(1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I).&nbsp; It inspires Portia&rsquo;s
+speech about Mercy.&nbsp; Here I give a version of the Latin.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief
+magistrate (<i>principem</i>) <i>. . . </i>No one can think of anything
+more becoming to a ruler than clemency . . . which will be confessed
+the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher
+office . . . But if the placable and just gods punish not instantly
+with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just
+it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power.&nbsp;
+What?&nbsp; Holds not he the place nearest to the gods, who, bearing
+himself like the gods, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for
+the better? . . .&nbsp; Think . . . what a lone desert and waste Rome
+would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would
+absolve.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia&rsquo;s speech:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Consider this<br>
+That in the course of Justice none of us<br>
+Should see salvation.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia&rsquo;s
+eloquence.<br>
+<br>
+Now take Portia:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The quality of Mercy is not strain&rsquo;d;<br>
+It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven<br>
+Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;<br>
+It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+(Not much Seneca, so far!)<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;&rsquo;Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes<br>
+The thron&egrave;d monarch better than his crown;<br>
+His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,<br>
+The attribute to awe and majesty,<br>
+Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;<br>
+But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,<br>
+It is enthron&egrave;d in the hearts of kings,<br>
+It is an attribute to God himself;<br>
+And earthly power doth then show likest God&rsquo;s,<br>
+When mercy seasons justice . . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already
+cited, and theological in origin.<br>
+<br>
+Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections,
+without having read Seneca&rsquo;s <i>De Clementia</i>,<i> </i>whether,
+if he could not conceive the ideas &ldquo;out of his own head,&rdquo;
+he might not hear Seneca&rsquo;s words translated in a sermon, or in
+conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must
+decide for himself.&nbsp; Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick
+out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay
+of the tutor of Nero.<br>
+<br>
+My view of Shakespeare&rsquo;s Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter
+Raleigh. <a name="citation64a"></a><a href="#footnote64a">{64a}</a>&nbsp;
+As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach
+the subject, and who have had a classical education.&nbsp; An exception
+was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following
+chapter.<br>
+<br>
+In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns
+did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing).&nbsp;
+Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature.&nbsp; &ldquo;His
+plays,&rdquo; says Sir Walter Raleigh, &ldquo;are extraordinarily rich
+in the floating debris of popular literature, - scraps and tags and
+broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs.&nbsp; In
+this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries. . . .&nbsp;
+Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool
+in <i>Lear </i>and the Grave-digger in <i>Hamlet</i>,<i> </i>even Ophelia
+and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs. . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation65a"></a><a href="#footnote65a">{65a}</a>&nbsp;
+He is rich in rural proverbs <i>not </i>recorded in Bacon&rsquo;s <i>Promus.<br>
+<br>
+</i>Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, &ldquo;was
+making himself all the time.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete
+rural words.&nbsp; Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the
+tags of song, ballad, story, and <i>dicton</i>.&nbsp; But so may Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV: MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE&rsquo;S LEARNING<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+That Shakspere, whether &ldquo;scholar&rdquo; or not, had a very wide
+and deep knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the
+whole field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr.
+Greenwood seems to admire in that &ldquo;violent Stratfordian,&rdquo;
+Mr. Churton Collins. <a name="citation69a"></a><a href="#footnote69a">{69a}</a>&nbsp;
+I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade classical scholars who have
+never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their
+merits the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide classical knowledge?&nbsp;
+Does he use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?<br>
+<br>
+My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide
+reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It was
+his native tendency to find coincidences in poetic passages (which,
+to some, to me for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to
+explain coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing.&nbsp; One
+remarked in him these tendencies long before he wrote on the classical
+acquirements of Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of
+authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned
+coincidences.&nbsp; The question is of the widest range.&nbsp; Some
+inquirers explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales,
+proverbs, and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a
+single centre (usually India).&nbsp; Others, like myself, do not deny
+cases of transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and independent,
+though coincident invention.&nbsp; I do not believe that the Arunta
+of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central feature of the
+myth of Isis and Osiris.<br>
+<br>
+It is not on Shakespeare&rsquo;s use, now and then, of Greek and Latin
+models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins himself,
+and not earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the saturation
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s mind with Roman and Athenian literature.&nbsp;
+Consequently we can only do justice to Mr. Collins&rsquo;s system, if
+we compare example after example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+borrowing.&nbsp; This is a long and irksome task; and the only fair
+plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins&rsquo;s <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,<i>
+</i>compare the Greek and Roman texts, and weigh each example of supposed
+borrowing for himself.&nbsp; Baconians must delight in this labour.<br>
+<br>
+I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare
+to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays of Plautus made
+by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the <i>Men&aelig;chmi
+</i>as the model of <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>.&nbsp; He does not borrow
+phrases from it, as he does from North&rsquo;s <i>Plutarch.<br>
+<br>
+Venus and Adonis </i>owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple
+patches, scattered in different parts of the <i>Metamorphoses.&nbsp;
+Lucrece </i>is based on the then untranslated <i>Fasti </i>of Ovid.&nbsp;
+I do not think Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for
+himself; or too proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some
+poor young University man in London.&nbsp; That is a simple and natural
+means by which he could help himself when in search of a subject for
+a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare&rsquo;s wide and
+profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: &ldquo;Nothing
+which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with certainty
+that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even that he possessed
+enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek
+text.&rdquo; <a name="citation71a"></a><a href="#footnote71a">{71a}</a>&nbsp;
+In that case, how did Shakespeare&rsquo;s English become contaminated,
+as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek <i>idioms</i>,<i> </i>while he
+only knew the Greek plays through Latin translations?<br>
+<br>
+However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic literature by a
+method of which he knows the perils - &ldquo;it is always perilous to
+infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may be mere coincidences.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation72a"></a><a href="#footnote72a">{72a}</a>&nbsp; Yet
+this method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of success
+every reader must judge for himself.<br>
+<br>
+He thinks it &ldquo;surely not unlikely&rdquo; that Polonius&rsquo;s<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Neither a borrower nor a lender be:<br>
+For loan oft loses both itself and friend,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (<i>Trinummus</i>,<i>
+</i>iv. 3).&nbsp; Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if
+ever there were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of
+the borrowers and lenders.<br>
+<br>
+Next, take this of Plautus (<i>Pseudolus</i>,<i> </i>I, iv. 7-10), &ldquo;But
+just as the poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists
+nowhere among men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which
+is mere fiction.&rdquo;&nbsp; We are to take this as the possible germ
+of Theseus&rsquo;s theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And as imagination bodies forth<br>
+The <i>forms </i>of things unknown, the poet&rsquo;s pen<br>
+Turns them to <i>shapes</i>,<i> </i>and gives to airy nothing<br>
+A local habitation and a name.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The reasoning is odd; imagination bodies forth <i>forms</i>,<i> </i>and
+the poet&rsquo;s pen turns them to<i> shapes</i>.&nbsp; But to suppose
+that Shakespeare here borrowed from Plautus appears highly superfluous.<br>
+<br>
+These are samples of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s methods throughout.<br>
+<br>
+Of Terence there were translations - first in part; later, in 1598,
+of the whole.&nbsp; Of Seneca there was an English version (1581).&nbsp;
+Mr. Collins labours to show that one passage &ldquo;almost certainly&rdquo;
+implies Shakespeare&rsquo;s use of the Latin; but it was used &ldquo;by
+an inexact scholar,&rdquo; - a terribly inexact scholar, if he thought
+that &ldquo;<i>alienus</i>&rdquo; (&ldquo;what belongs to another&rdquo;)
+meant &ldquo;slippery&rdquo;!<br>
+<br>
+Most of the passages are from plays (<i>Titus Andronicus </i>and <i>Henry
+VI</i>,<i> </i>i., ii., iii.), which Mr. Greenwood denies (usually)
+to <i>his </i>author, the Great Unknown.&nbsp; Throughout these early
+plays Mr. Collins takes Shakespeare&rsquo;s to resemble Seneca&rsquo;s
+<i>Latin </i>style: Shakespeare, then, took up Greek tragedy in later
+life; after the early period when he dealt with Seneca.&nbsp; Here is
+a sample of borrowing from Horace, &ldquo;<i>Persicos odi puer apparatus</i>&rdquo;
+(<i>Odes</i>. I, xxxviii. I).&nbsp; Mr. Collins quotes <i>Lear </i>(III,
+vi. 85) thus, &ldquo;You will say they are <i>Persian attire</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Really, Lear in his wild way says to Edgar, &ldquo;I do not like the
+fashion of your garments: you will say they are Persian; but let them
+be changed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins changes this into &ldquo;you will
+say they are <i>Persian attire</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>a phrase &ldquo;which
+could only have occurred to a classical scholar.&rdquo;&nbsp; The phrase
+is not in Shakespeare, and Lear&rsquo;s wandering mind might as easily
+select &ldquo;Persian&rdquo; as any other absurdity.<br>
+<br>
+So it is throughout.&nbsp; Two great poets write on the fear of death,
+on the cries of new-born children, on dissolution and recombination
+in nature, on old age; they have ideas in common, obvious ideas, glorified
+by poetry, - and Shakespeare, we are told, is borrowing from Lucretius
+or Juvenal; while the critic leaves his reader to find out and study
+the Latin passages which he does not quote.&nbsp; So arbitrary is taste
+in these matters that Mr. Collins, like Mr. Grant White, but independently,
+finds Shakespeare putting a thought from the <i>Alcibiades I </i>of
+Plato into the mouth of Achilles in <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,<i>
+</i>while Mr. J. M. Robertson suggests that the borrowing is from Seneca
+- where Mr. Collins does not find &ldquo;the smallest parallel.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Mr. Collins is certainly right; the author of <i>Troilus </i>makes Ulysses
+quote Plato as &ldquo;the author&rdquo; of a remark, and makes Achilles
+take up the quotation, which Ulysses goes on to criticise.<br>
+<br>
+Thus, in this play, not only Aristotle (as Hector says) but Plato are
+taken to have lived before the Trojan war, and to have been read by
+the Ach&aelig;ans!<br>
+<br>
+There were Latin translations of Plato; the <i>Alcibiades I </i>was
+published apart, from Ficinus&rsquo; version, in 1560, with the sub-title,
+<i>Concerning the Nature of Man</i>.&nbsp; Who had read it? - Shakespeare,
+or one of the two authors (Dekker and Chettle) of another <i>Troilus
+and Cressida </i>(now lost), or Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Unknown?&nbsp;
+Which of these Platonists chose to say that Plato and Aristotle lived
+long before Homer?&nbsp; Which of them followed the Ionic and medi&aelig;val
+anti-Ach&aelig;an view of Homer&rsquo;s heroes, as given in the Troy
+Books of the Middle Ages, and yet knew Iliad, Book VII, and admired
+Odysseus, whom the Ionian tradition abhors?&nbsp; <i>Troilus and Cressida
+</i>is indeed a mystery, but Somebody concerned in it had read Ficinus&rsquo;
+version of the <i>Alcibiades</i>; <a name="citation75a"></a><a href="#footnote75a">{75a}</a>
+and yet made the monstrous anachronism of dating Aristotle and Plato
+before the Trojan war.&nbsp; &ldquo;That was his fun,&rdquo; as Charles
+Lamb said in another connection.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Collins, it is plain, goes much further than the &ldquo;small Latin&rdquo;
+with which his age (like myself) credited Shakespeare.&nbsp; He could
+read Latin, Mr. Collins thinks, as easily as an educated Briton reads
+French - that is, as easily as he reads English.&nbsp; Still further,
+Shakespeare, through Latin translations, was so saturated with the Greek
+drama &ldquo;that the characteristics which differentiate his work from
+the work of his contemporaries and recall in essentials the work of
+the Greek dramatists are actually attributable to these dramatists.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Ben Jonson, and all the more or less well-taught University wits, as
+far as I remember, like Greene, Marlowe, and Lyly, do not show much
+acquaintance with Euripides, &AElig;schylus, Sophocles, and do not often
+remind us of these masters.&nbsp; Shakespeare does remind us of them
+- the only question is, do the resemblances arise from his possession
+of a genius akin to that of Greece, or was his memory so stored with
+all the treasures of their art that the waters of Helicon kept bubbling
+up through the wells of Avon?<br>
+<br>
+But does Mr. Collins prove (what, as he admits, <i>cannot </i>be demonstrated)
+that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians?&nbsp; He begins
+by saying that he will not bottom his case &ldquo;on the ground of parallels
+in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are
+likely to be&rdquo; (fortuitous) &ldquo;coincidences.&rdquo;&nbsp; Three
+pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Curiously close similarities of expression&rdquo; are also barred.&nbsp;
+Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and &AElig;schylus,
+plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!).&nbsp; Again,
+&ldquo;identities of sentiment under similar circumstances&rdquo; are
+not to be cited; two pages <i>are </i>cited; and &ldquo;similarities,
+however striking they may be in metaphorical expression,&rdquo; cannot
+safely be used; several pages of them follow.<br>
+<br>
+Finally, Mr. Collins chooses a single play, the <i>Aias </i>of Sophocles,
+and tests Shakespeare by that, unluckily in part from <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i>
+</i>which Mr. Greenwood regards (usually) as non-Shakespearean, or not
+by his unknown great author.&nbsp; <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,<i> </i>whatever
+part Shakespeare may have had in it, does suggest to me that the author
+or authors knew of Homer no more than the few books of the Iliad, first
+translated by Chapman and published in 1598.&nbsp; But he or they did
+know the <i>Aias </i>of Sophocles, according to Mr. Collins: so did
+the author of <i>Romeo and Juliet.<br>
+<br>
+</i>Now all these sorts of parallels between Shakespeare and the Greeks
+are, Mr. Collins tells us, not to count as proofs that Shakespeare knew
+the Greek tragedians.&nbsp; &ldquo;We have obviously to be on our guard&rdquo;
+<a name="citation77a"></a><a href="#footnote77a">{77a}</a> against three
+kinds of such parallels, which &ldquo;may be mere coincidences,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation77b"></a><a href="#footnote77b">{77b}</a> fortuitous
+coincidences.&nbsp; But these coincidences against which &ldquo;we must
+be on our guard&rdquo; fill sixteen pages (pp. 46-63).&nbsp; These pages
+must necessarily produce a considerable effect in the way of persuading
+the reader that Shakespeare knew the Greek tragedians as intimately
+as Mr. Collins did.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood is obliged to leave these parallels
+to readers of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s essay.&nbsp; Indeed, what more can
+we do?&nbsp; Who would read through a criticism of each instance?&nbsp;
+Two or three may be given.&nbsp; The Queen in <i>Hamlet </i>reminds
+that prince, grieving for his father&rsquo;s death, that &ldquo;all
+that live must die&rdquo;:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;That loss is common to the race,<br>
+And common is the common-place.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Greek Chorus offers the commonplace to Electra, - and here is a
+parallel!&nbsp; Again, two Greeks agree with Shakespeare that anxious
+expectation of evil is worse than actual experience thereof.&nbsp; Greece
+agrees with Shakespeare that ill-gotten gains do not thrive, or that
+it is not lucky to be &ldquo;a corby messenger&rdquo; of bad news; or
+that all goes ill when a man acts against his better nature; or that
+we suffer most from the harm which we bring on ourselves; or that there
+is strength in a righteous cause; or that blood calls for blood (an
+idea common to Semites, Greeks, and English readers of the Bible); or
+that, having lost a very good man, you will not soon see his like again,
+- and so on as long as you please.&nbsp; Of such wisdom are proverbs
+made, and savages and Europeans have many parallel proverbs.&nbsp; <i>Vestigia
+nulla retrorsum </i>is as well known to Bushmen as to Latinists.&nbsp;
+Manifestly nothing in this kind proves, or even suggests, that Shakespeare
+was saturated in Greek tragedy.&nbsp; But page on page of such facts
+as that both Shakespeare and Sophocles talk, one of &ldquo;the belly-pinched
+wolf,&rdquo; the other of &ldquo;the empty-bellied wolf,&rdquo; are
+apt to impress the reader - and verily both Shakespeare and &AElig;schylus
+talk of &ldquo;the heart dancing for joy.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Collins repeats
+that such things are no proof, but he keeps on piling them up.&nbsp;
+It was a theory of Shakespeare&rsquo;s time that the apparent ghost
+of a dead man might be an impersonation of him by the devil.&nbsp; Hamlet
+knows this -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The spirit that I have seen may be the devil.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Orestes (<i>Electra</i>,<i> </i>Euripides) asks whether it may not be
+an avenging d&aelig;mon (<i>alastor</i>)<i> </i>in the shape of a god,
+that bids him avenge his father.&nbsp; Is Shakespeare borrowing from
+Euripides, or from a sermon, or any contemporary work on ghosts, such
+as that of Lavater?<br>
+<br>
+A girl dies or is sacrificed before her marriage, and characters in
+<i>Romeo and Juliet</i>,<i> </i>and in Euripides, both say that Death
+is her bridegroom.&nbsp; Anyone might say that, anywhere, as in the
+Greek Anthology -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;For Death not for Love hast thou loosened thy zone.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+One needs the space of a book wherein to consider such parallels.&nbsp;
+But confessedly, though a parade is made of them, they do not prove
+that Shakespeare constantly read Greek tragedies in Latin translations.<br>
+<br>
+To let the truth out, the resemblances are mainly found in such commonplaces:
+as when both Aias and Antony address the Sun of their latest day in
+life; or when John of Gaunt and Aias both pun on their own names.<br>
+<br>
+The situations, in <i>Hamlet </i>and the <i>Choephor&aelig; </i>and
+<i>Electra</i>,<i> </i>are so close that resemblances in some passages
+must and do occur, and Mr. Collins does not comment specially upon the
+closest resemblance of all: the English case is here the murder of Duncan,
+the Greek is the murder of Agamemnon.<br>
+<br>
+Now it would be easy for me to bring forward many close parallels between
+Homer and the old Irish epic story of Cuchulainn, between Homer and
+<i>Beowulf </i>and the Njal&rsquo;s saga, yet Norsemen and the early
+Irish were not students of Homer!&nbsp; The parallel passages in Homer,
+on one side, and the Old Irish <i>Tain Bo Cualgne</i>,<i> </i>and the
+Anglo-Saxon epics, are so numerous and close that the theory of borrowing
+from Homer has actually occurred to a distinguished Greek scholar.&nbsp;
+But no student of Irish and Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry has been found,
+I think, to suggest that Early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Court minstrels
+knew Greek.&nbsp; The curious may consult Mr. Munro Chadwick&rsquo;s
+<i>The Heroic Age </i>(1912), especially Chapter XV, &ldquo;The Common
+Characteristics of Teutonic and Greek Heroic Poetry,&rdquo; and to what
+Mr. Chadwick says much might be added.<br>
+<br>
+But, to be short, Mr. Collins&rsquo;s case can only be judged by readers
+of his most interesting <i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>.&nbsp; To me,
+Hamlet&rsquo;s soliloquy on death resembles a fragment from the <i>Ph&oelig;nix
+</i>of Euripides no more closely than two sets of reflections by great
+poets on the text that &ldquo;of death we know nothing&rdquo; are bound
+to do, - though Shakespeare&rsquo;s are infinitely the richer.&nbsp;
+For Shakespeare&rsquo;s reflections on death, save where Christians
+die in a Christian spirit, are as agnostic as those of the post-&AElig;schylean
+Greek and early Anglo-Saxon poets.&nbsp; In many respects, as Mr. Collins
+proves, Shakespeare&rsquo;s highest and deepest musings are Greek in
+tone.&nbsp; But of all English poets he who came nearest to Greece in
+his art was Keats, who of Greek knew nothing.&nbsp; In the same way,
+a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death,
+is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native
+Fijian poet&rsquo;s lines on old age, <i>sine amore jocisque</i>,<i>
+</i>borrowed from Mimnermus!&nbsp; There is such a thing as congruity
+of genius.&nbsp; Mr. Collins states the hypothesis - not his own - &ldquo;that
+<i>by a certain natural affinity </i>Shakespeare caught also the accent
+and tone as well as some of the most striking characteristics of Greek
+tragedy.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Though far from accepting most of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s long array of
+Greek parallels, I do hold that by &ldquo;natural affinity,&rdquo; by
+congruity of genius, Shakespeare approached and resembled the great
+Athenians.<br>
+<br>
+One thing seems certain to me.&nbsp; If Shakspere read and borrowed
+from Greek poetry, he knew it as well (except Homer) as Mr. Collins
+knew it; and remembered what he knew with Mr. Collins&rsquo;s extraordinary
+tenacity of memory.<br>
+<br>
+Now if &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; did all that, he was not the actor.&nbsp;
+The author, on Mr. Collins&rsquo;s showing, must have been a very sedulous
+and diligent student of Greek poetry, above all of the drama, down to
+its fragments.&nbsp; The Baconians assuredly ought to try to prove,
+from Bacon&rsquo;s works, that he was such a student.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Collins, &ldquo;a violent Stratfordian,&rdquo; overproved his case.&nbsp;
+If his proofs be accepted, Shakspere the actor knew the Greek tragedians
+as well as did Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp; If the author of the plays were
+so learned, the actor was not the author, in my opinion - he <i>was</i>,<i>
+</i>in the opinion of Mr. Collins.<br>
+<br>
+If Shakespeare&rsquo;s spirit and those of Sophocles and &AElig;schylus
+meet, it is because they move on the same heights, and thence survey
+with &ldquo;the poet&rsquo;s sad lucidity&rdquo; the same &ldquo;pageant
+of men&rsquo;s miseries.&rdquo;&nbsp; But how dissimilar in expression
+Shakespeare can be, how luxuriant and apart from the austerity of Greece,
+we observe in one of Mr. Collins&rsquo;s parallels.<br>
+<br>
+Polynices, in the <i>Ph&oelig;niss&aelig; </i>of Euripides (504-506),
+exclaims:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;To the stars&rsquo; risings, and the sun&rsquo;s I&rsquo;d go,<br>
+And dive &rsquo;neath earth, - if I could do this thing, -<br>
+Possess Heaven&rsquo;s highest boon of sovereignty.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Then compare Hotspur:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;By Heaven, methinks it were an easy leap<br>
+To pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon,<br>
+Or dive into the bottom of the deep,<br>
+Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,<br>
+And pluck up drown&egrave;d honour by the locks,<br>
+So he that doth redeem her thence, might wear<br>
+Without corrival all her dignities.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+What a hurrying crowd of pictures rush through Hotspur&rsquo;s mind!&nbsp;
+Is Shakespeare thinking of the <i>Ph&oelig;niss&aelig;</i>,<i> </i>or
+is he speaking only on the promptings of his genius?<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V: SHAKESPEARE, GENIUS, AND SOCIETY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A phrase has been used to explain the Greek element in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+work, namely, &ldquo;congruity of genius,&rdquo; which is apt to be
+resented by Baconians.&nbsp; Perhaps they have a right to resent it,
+for &ldquo;genius&rdquo; is hard to define, and genius is invoked by
+some wild wits to explain feats of Shakespeare&rsquo;s which (to Baconians)
+appear &ldquo;miracles.&rdquo;&nbsp; A &ldquo;miracle&rdquo; also is
+notoriously hard to define; but we may take it (&ldquo;under all reserves&rdquo;)
+to stand for the occurrence of an event, or the performance of an action
+which, to the speaker who applies the word &ldquo;miracle,&rdquo; seems
+&ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; The speaker therefore says, &ldquo;The
+event is impossible; miracles do not happen: therefore the reported
+event never occurred.&nbsp; The alleged performance, the writing of
+the plays by the actor, was impossible, was a miracle, therefore was
+done by some person or persons other than the actor.&rdquo;&nbsp; This
+idea of the <i>impossibility </i>of the player&rsquo;s authorship is
+the foundation of the Baconian edifice.<br>
+<br>
+I have, to the best of my ability, tried to describe Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+view of the young provincial from Warwickshire, Will Shakspere.&nbsp;
+If Will were what Mr. Greenwood thinks he was, then Will&rsquo;s authorship
+of the plays seems to me, &ldquo;humanly speaking,&rdquo; impossible.&nbsp;
+But then Mr. Greenwood appeared to omit from his calculations the circumstance
+that Will <i>may </i>have been, not merely &ldquo;a sharp boy&rdquo;
+but a boy of great parts; and not without a love of stories and poetry:
+a passion which, in a bookless region, could only be gratified through
+folk-song, folk-tale, and such easy Latin as he might take the trouble
+to read.&nbsp; If we add to these very unusual but not wholly impossible
+tastes and abilities, that Will <i>may </i>have been a lad of genius,
+there is no more &ldquo;miracle&rdquo; in his case than in other supreme
+examples of genius.&nbsp; &ldquo;But genius cannot work miracles, cannot
+do what is impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; Do what is impossible to whom?&nbsp;
+To the critics, the men of common sense.<br>
+<br>
+Alas, all this way of talking about &ldquo;miracles,&rdquo; and &ldquo;the
+impossible,&rdquo; and &ldquo;genius&rdquo; is quite vague and popular.&nbsp;
+What do we mean by &ldquo;genius&rdquo;?&nbsp; The Latin term originally
+designates, not a man&rsquo;s everyday intellect, but a spirit from
+without which inspires him, like the &ldquo;D&aelig;mon,&rdquo; or,
+in Latin, &ldquo;Genius&rdquo; of Socrates, or the <i>lutin </i>which
+rode the pen of Moli&egrave;re.&nbsp; &ldquo;Genius&rdquo; is claimed
+for Shakespeare in an inscription on his Stratford monument, erected
+at latest some six years after his death.&nbsp; Following this path
+of thought we come to &ldquo;inspiration&rdquo;: the notion of it, as
+familiar to Australian savages as to any modern minds, is that, to the
+poet, what he produces is <i>given </i>by some power greater than himself,
+by the <i>Boilyas </i>(spirits) or Pundjel, the Father of all.&nbsp;
+This pal&aelig;olithic psychology, of course, is now quite discredited,
+yet the term &ldquo;genius&rdquo; is still (perhaps superstitiously)
+applied to the rare persons whose intellectual faculties lightly outrun
+those of ordinary mortals, and who do marvels with means apparently
+inadequate.<br>
+<br>
+In recent times some philosophers, like Mr. F. W. H. Myers, put - in
+place of the Muses or the <i>Boilyas</i>,<i> </i>or the Genius - what
+they call the &ldquo;Subliminal Self,&rdquo; something &ldquo;far more
+deeply interfused than the everyday intellect.&rdquo;&nbsp; This subconscious
+self, capable of far more than the conscious intelligence, is genius.<br>
+<br>
+On the other side, genius may fairly be regarded as faculty, only higher
+in degree, and not at all different in kind, from the everyday intellect
+which, for example, pens this page.<br>
+<br>
+Thus as soon as we begin to speak of &ldquo;genius,&rdquo; we are involved
+in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical;
+in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by physiological
+science or experimental psychology, or by psychical research, or by
+the study of heredity.&nbsp; When I speak of &ldquo;the genius of Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc, of Bacon, even of Wellington, I possibly have
+a meaning which is not in all respects the meaning of Mr. Greenwood,
+when he uses the term &ldquo;genius&rdquo;; so we are apt to misunderstand
+each other.&nbsp; Yet we all glibly use the term &ldquo;genius,&rdquo;
+without definition and without discussion.<br>
+<br>
+At once, too, in this quest, we jostle against &ldquo;that fool of a
+word,&rdquo; as Napoleon said, &ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; At once,
+on either side, we assume that we know what is possible and what is
+impossible, - and so pretend to omniscience.<br>
+<br>
+Thus some &ldquo;Stratfordians,&rdquo; or defenders of the actor&rsquo;s
+authorship, profess to know - from all the signed work of Bacon, and
+from all that has reached us about Bacon&rsquo;s occupations and preoccupations,
+from 1590 to 1605 - that the theory of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship of the
+plays is &ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;&nbsp; I, however, do not profess
+this omniscience.<br>
+<br>
+On the other side the Baconian, arguing from all that <i>he </i>knows,
+or thinks he knows, or can imagine, of the actor&rsquo;s education,
+conditions of life, and opportunities, argues that the authorship of
+the actor is &ldquo;impossible.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Both sides assume to be omniscient, but we incontestably know much more
+about Bacon, in his works, his aims, his inclinations, and in his life,
+than we know about the actor; while about &ldquo;the potentialities
+of genius,&rdquo; we know - very little.<br>
+<br>
+Thus, with all Bacon&rsquo;s occupations and preoccupations, he had,
+the Baconians will allow, <i>genius</i>.&nbsp; By the miracle of genius
+he <i>may </i>have found time and developed inclination, to begin by
+furbishing up older plays for a company of actors: he did it extremely
+well, but what a quaint taste for a courtier and scholar!&nbsp; The
+eccentricities of genius <i>may </i>account for his choice of a &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>which, if he desired concealment, was the
+last that was likely to serve his turn.&nbsp; He may also have divined
+all the Doll Tearsheets and Mrs. Quicklys and Pistols, whom, conceivably,
+he did not much frequent.<br>
+<br>
+I am not one of those who deny that Bacon might have written <i>Hamlet
+</i>&ldquo;if he had the mind,&rdquo; as Charles Lamb said of Wordsworth.&nbsp;
+Not at all; I am the last to limit the potentialities of genius.<br>
+<br>
+But suppose, merely for the sake of argument, that Will Shakspere too
+had genius in that amazing degree which, in <i>Henry V</i>,<i> </i>the
+Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Canterbury describe and discuss
+in the case of the young king.&nbsp; In this passage we perceive that
+the poet had brooded over and been puzzled by the &ldquo;miracle&rdquo;
+(he uses the word) of genius.&nbsp; Says Canterbury speaking of the
+Prince&rsquo;s wild youth,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Never was such a sudden scholar made.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+One Baconian objection to Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorship is that during
+his early years in London (say 1587-92) he was &ldquo;such a sudden
+scholar made&rdquo; in various things.<br>
+<br>
+The young king&rsquo;s<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;addiction was to courses vain,<br>
+His companies unletter&rsquo;d, rude, and shallow,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+precisely like Shakespeare&rsquo;s courses and companions at Stratford<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Had never noted in him any study.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Stratford tradition, a century after Shakespeare left the town, did
+not remember &ldquo;any study&rdquo; in him; none had been &ldquo;noted,&rdquo;
+nor could have been remembered.&nbsp; To return to Henry, he shines
+in divinity, knowledge of &ldquo;commonwealth affairs,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You would say, it hath been all in all his study.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+He is as intimate with the art of war; to him &ldquo;Gordian knots of
+policy&rdquo; are &ldquo;familiar as his garter.&rdquo;&nbsp; He <i>must
+</i>have<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The art and practic part of life,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+as &ldquo;mistress to this theorie,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+as his youth was riotous, and was lived in all men&rsquo;s gaze,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And never noted in him any study,<br>
+Any retirement, any sequestration<br>
+From open haunts and popularity.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The Bishop of Ely can only suggest that Henry&rsquo;s study or &ldquo;contemplation&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,<br>
+Unseen,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+and Canterbury says<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It must be so, for miracles are ceased.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And thus the miracle of genius baffles the poet, for Henry&rsquo;s had
+been &ldquo;noisy nights,&rdquo; notoriously noisy.<br>
+<br>
+Now, as we shall later show, Bacon&rsquo;s rapid production of the plays,
+considering his other contemporary activities and varied but always
+absorbing interests, was as much a miracle as the sudden blossoming
+of Henry&rsquo;s knowledge and accomplishments; for all Bacon&rsquo;s
+known exertions and occupations, and his deepest and most absorbing
+interest, were remote from the art of tragedy and comedy.&nbsp; If we
+are to admit the marvel of genius in Bacon, of whose life and pursuits
+we know much, by parity of reasoning we may grant that the actor, of
+whom we know much less, may have had genius: had powers and could use
+opportunities in a way for which Baconians make no allowance.<br>
+<br>
+We now turn to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s chapter, &ldquo;Shakespeare and
+&lsquo;Genius.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; It opens with the accustomed list
+of poor Will&rsquo;s disqualifications, &ldquo;a boy born of illiterate
+parents,&rdquo; but we need not rehearse the list. <a name="citation91a"></a><a href="#footnote91a">{91a}</a>&nbsp;
+He &ldquo;comes to town&rdquo; (date unknown) &ldquo;a needy adventurer&rdquo;;
+in 1593 appeared the poem <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>author&rsquo;s
+name being printed as &ldquo;W. Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then comes
+<i>Lucrece </i>(1594).&nbsp; In 1598 <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> </i>printed as &ldquo;corrected and augmented&rdquo; by
+&ldquo;W. Shakespere.&rdquo;&nbsp; And so on with all the rest.&nbsp;
+Criticism of the learning and splendour of the two poems follows.&nbsp;
+To <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i> </i>and
+the amusing things written about it by Baconians, I return; and to Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;impossible&rdquo; knowledge of courtly society, his &ldquo;polish
+and urbanity,&rdquo; his familiar acquaintance with contemporary French
+politics, foreign proverbs, and &ldquo;the gossip of the Court&rdquo;
+of Elizabeth: these points are made by His Honour Judge Webb.<br>
+<br>
+All this lore to Shakespeare is &ldquo;impossible&rdquo; - he could
+not read, say some Baconians, or had no Latin, or had next to none;
+on these points I have said my say.&nbsp; The omniscient Baconians know
+that all the early works ascribed to the actor were impossible, to a
+man of, say thirty - who <i>was </i>no more, and <i>knew </i>no more,
+than they know that the actor was and knew; and as for &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo;
+it cannot work miracles.&nbsp; Genius &ldquo;bestows upon no one a knowledge
+of facts,&rdquo; &ldquo;Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could
+impart only what he had learned.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Precisely, but genius as I understand it (and even cleverness) has a
+way of acquiring knowledge of facts where the ordinary &ldquo;dull intelligent
+man&rdquo; gains none.&nbsp; Keen interest, keen curiosity, swift observation,
+even the power of tearing out the things essential from a book, the
+gift of rapid reading; the faculty of being alive to the fingertips,
+- these, with a tenacious memory, may enable a small boy to know more
+facts of many sorts than his elders and betters and all the neighbours.&nbsp;
+They are puzzled, if they make the discovery of his knowledge.&nbsp;
+Scott was such a small boy; whether we think him a man of genius or
+not.&nbsp; Shakspere, even the actor, was, perhaps, a man of genius,
+and possessed this power of rapid acquisition and vivid retention of
+all manner of experience and information.&nbsp; To what I suppose to
+have been his opportunities in London, I shall return.&nbsp; Meanwhile,
+let the doubter take up any popular English books of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+day: he will find them replete with much knowledge wholly new to him
+- which he will also find in Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+A good example is this: Judge Webb proclaimed that in points of scientific
+lore (the lore of that age) Shakespeare and Bacon were much on a level.&nbsp;
+Professor Tyrrell, in a newspaper, said that the facts staggered him,
+as a &ldquo;Stratfordian.&rdquo;&nbsp; A friend told me that he too
+was equally moved.&nbsp; I replied that these pseudoscientific &ldquo;facts&rdquo;
+had long been commonplaces.&nbsp; Pliny was a rich source of them.&nbsp;
+Professor Dowden took the matter up, with full knowledge, <a name="citation93a"></a><a href="#footnote93a">{93a}</a>
+and reconverted Mr. Tyrrell, who wrote: &ldquo;I am not versed in the
+literature of the Shakespearian era, and I assumed that the Baconians
+who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences
+were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet.&nbsp;
+Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so.&rdquo; <a name="citation93b"></a><a href="#footnote93b">{93b}</a><br>
+<br>
+Were I to enter seriously on this point of genius, I should begin by
+requesting my adversaries to read Mr. F. W. H. Myers&rsquo;s papers
+on &ldquo;The Mechanism of Genius&rdquo; (in his <i>Human Personality</i>),<i>
+</i>and to consider the humble problem of &ldquo;Calculating Boys,&rdquo;
+which is touched on also by Cardinal Newman.&nbsp; How do they, at the
+age of innocence, arrive at their amazing results?&nbsp; How did the
+child Pascal, ignorant of Euclid, work out the Euclidean propositions
+of &ldquo;bars and rounds,&rdquo; as he called lines and circles?&nbsp;
+Science has no solution!<br>
+<br>
+Transport the problem into the region of poetry and knowledge of human
+nature, take Will in place of Pascal and Gauss, and (in manners and
+matter of war) Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc; - and science, I fancy, is much to
+seek for a reply.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood considers, among others, the case of Robert Burns.&nbsp;
+The parallel is very interesting, and does not, I think, turn so much
+to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s advantage as he supposes.&nbsp; The genius
+of Burns, of course, is far indeed below the level of that of the author
+of the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; But that author and Burns have this
+in common with each other (and obviously with Homer), that their work
+arises from a basis of older materials, already manipulated by earlier
+artists.&nbsp; Burns almost always has a key-note already touched, as
+confessedly in the poems of his predecessor, Fergusson; of Hamilton
+of Gilbertfield; in songs, popular or artistic, and so forth.&nbsp;
+He &ldquo;alchemised&rdquo; his materials, as Mr. Greenwood says of
+his author of the plays; turned dross into gold, brick into marble.&nbsp;
+Notoriously much Shakespearean work is of the same nature.<br>
+<br>
+The education of Burns he owed to his peasant father, to his parish
+school (in many such schools he might have acquired Latin and Greek;
+in fact he did not), to a tutor who read with him some English and French;
+and he knew a modernised version of Blind Harry&rsquo;s <i>Wallace;
+</i>Locke&rsquo;s <i>Essay; The Spectator</i>,<i> </i>novels of the
+day, and vernacular Scots poets of his century, with a world of old
+Scots songs.&nbsp; These things, and such as these, were Burns&rsquo;s
+given literary materials.&nbsp; He used them in the only way open to
+him, in poems written for a rural audience, and published for an Edinburgh
+public.&nbsp; No classical, no theatrical materials were given; or,
+if he read the old drama, he could not, in his rural conditions, and
+in a Scotland where the theatre was in a very small way, venture on
+producing plays, for which there was no demand, while he had no knowledge
+of the Stage.&nbsp; Burns found and filled the only channels open to
+him, in a printed book, and in music books for which he transmuted old
+songs.<br>
+<br>
+The bookish materials offered to Will, in London, were crammed with
+reminiscences from the classics, were mainly romantic and theatrical;
+and, from his profession of actor, by far the best channel open to him
+was the theatre.&nbsp; Badly as it paid the outside author, there was
+nothing that paid better.&nbsp; <i>Venus and Adonis </i>brought &ldquo;more
+praise than pudding,&rdquo; if one may venture a guess.&nbsp; With the
+freedom of the theatre Will could soar to all heights and plumb all
+depths.&nbsp; No such opportunity had Burns, even if he could have used
+it, and, owing to a variety of causes, his spirit soon ceased to soar
+high or wing wide.<br>
+<br>
+I take Shakespeare, in London at least, to have read the current Elizabethan
+light literature <i>- Euphues</i>,<i> </i>Lyly&rsquo;s Court comedies,
+novels full of the classics and of social life; Spenser, Sidney - his
+<i>Defence of Poesy</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Arcadia </i>(1590) - with scores
+of tales translated from the Italian, French, and Spanish, all full
+of foreign society, and discourses of knights and ladies.&nbsp; He saw
+the plays of the day, perhaps as one of &ldquo;the groundlings.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He often beheld Society, from without, when acting before the Queen
+and at great houses.&nbsp; He had thus, if I am right, sufficient examples
+of style and manner, and knowledge of how the great were supposed (in
+books) to comport and conduct themselves.&nbsp; The books were cheap,
+and could be borrowed, and turned over at the booksellers&rsquo; stalls.
+<a name="citation96a"></a><a href="#footnote96a">{96a}</a>&nbsp; The
+Elizabethan style was omnipresent.&nbsp; Suppose that Shakespeare was
+a clever man, a lover of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory,
+easily influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that
+my conjectures are not too audacious.&nbsp; Not only &ldquo;the man
+in the street,&rdquo; but &ldquo;the reading public&rdquo; (so loved
+by Coleridge), have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in which
+a quick man reads.&nbsp; Watch them poring for hours over a newspaper!&nbsp;
+Let me quote what Sir Walter Raleigh says: <a name="citation97a"></a><a href="#footnote97a">{97a}</a>
+&ldquo;Shakespeare was one of those swift and masterly readers who know
+what they want of a book; they scorn nothing that is dressed in print,
+but turn over the pages with a quick discernment of all that brings
+them new information, or jumps with their thought, or tickles their
+fancy.&nbsp; Such a reader will have done with a volume in a few minutes,
+yet what he has taken from it he keeps for years.&nbsp; He is a live
+man; and is sometimes judged by slower wits to be a learned man.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I am taking Shakespeare to have been a reader of this kind, as was Dr.
+Johnson, as are not a few men who have no pretensions to genius.&nbsp;
+The accomplishment is only a marvel to - well, I need not be particular
+about the kind of person to whom it is a marvel!<br>
+<br>
+Here, in fairness, the reader should be asked to consider an eloquent
+passage of comparison between the knowledge of Burns and of Will, quoted
+by Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation97b"></a><a href="#footnote97b">{97b}</a>
+from Mr. Morgan. <a name="citation97c"></a><a href="#footnote97c">{97c}</a><br>
+<br>
+Genius, says Mr. Morgan, &ldquo;did not guide Burns&rsquo;s untaught
+pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus.&rdquo;&nbsp; No!
+that was not Burns&rsquo;s lay; nor would he have found a public had
+he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who
+wrote <i>The Epigoniad</i>,<i> </i>and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the
+delight of David Hume, his friend.&nbsp; The public of 1780-90 did not
+want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature
+accessible to Burns full of the medi&aelig;val legends of Troy and Athens.&nbsp;
+But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the <i>medi&aelig;val
+</i>legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, <i>not </i>of
+Homer, Will made his market.&nbsp; Egypt he knew only in the new English
+version of Plutarch&rsquo;s <i>Lives; </i>of Homer, he (or the author
+of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>)<i> </i>used only Iliad VII., in Chapman&rsquo;s
+new translation (1598).&nbsp; For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps),
+and, certainly, Caxton&rsquo;s <i>Destruction of Troy</i>,<i> </i>still
+reprinted as a <i>popular </i>book as late as 1713.&nbsp; Will did not,
+as Mr. Morgan says, &ldquo;reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations
+and manners of nations born and buried and passed into history a thousand
+years before he had been begotten. . . &rdquo;&nbsp; He bestowed the
+manners of medi&aelig;val chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks.&nbsp;
+He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke.&nbsp; He gave Scotland
+cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.&nbsp;
+Look at his notion of &ldquo;the very manners&rdquo; of early post-Roman
+Britain in <i>Cymbeline </i>and <i>King Lear</i>!<i>&nbsp; </i>Concerning
+&ldquo;the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive
+Kings&rdquo; the author of <i>Macbeth </i>knew no more than what he
+read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince
+was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith&rsquo;s bothy), and
+of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated
+legends.&nbsp; The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan
+inexplicably declares that he had) of &ldquo;matters of curious and
+occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances
+or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools
+to teach!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>Mon Dieu</i>!<i> </i>do historians <i>not </i>treat of &ldquo;matters
+of curious research&rdquo; and of statutes and of treaties?&nbsp; As
+for &ldquo;old romances,&rdquo; they were current and popular.&nbsp;
+The &ldquo;occult&rdquo; sources of <i>King Lear </i>are a popular tale
+attached to legendary &ldquo;history&rdquo; and a story in Sidney&rsquo;s
+<i>Arcadia</i>.&nbsp; Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as &ldquo;a letterless
+peasant lad,&rdquo; or the Author, whoever he was, is not &ldquo;invested
+with all the love&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>,<i> v.1. </i>&ldquo;lore&rdquo;),<i>
+</i>&ldquo;which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and
+buried and forgotten.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Our friend&rsquo;s style has flowery components,&rdquo; Mr. Greenwood
+adds to this deliciously eloquent passage from his American author,
+&ldquo;and yet Shakespeare who did all this,&rdquo; <i>et c&aelig;tera</i>.&nbsp;
+But Shakespeare did <i>not </i>do &ldquo;all this&rdquo;!&nbsp; We know
+the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which &ldquo;Delphos&rdquo;
+is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated
+legends; North&rsquo;s <i>Plutarch</i>,<i> </i>done out of the French;
+older plays, and the rest of it.&nbsp; Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach
+and the <i>Hennskringla </i>for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which
+is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle-plays to the State
+Papers.&nbsp; Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up
+&ldquo;clasped books, buried and forgotten.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no
+original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and
+popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what
+he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence.&nbsp; And the common
+Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.<br>
+<br>
+But Mr. Greenwood asks &ldquo;what was the poetic output?&rdquo; in
+Burns&rsquo;s case. <a name="citation100a"></a><a href="#footnote100a">{100a}</a>&nbsp;
+It was what we know, and <i>that </i>was what suited his age and his
+circumstances.&nbsp; It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not
+drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who passed but one winter
+in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.<br>
+<br>
+Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested,
+to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.&nbsp; I have
+tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all-pervading
+classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy,
+general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet
+of the classics, - with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed
+and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide;
+with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays;
+and in the current popular <i>Morte d</i>&rsquo;<i>Arthur </i>and <i>Destruction
+of Troy.<br>
+<br>
+</i>I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that &ldquo;Genius
+is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and
+what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it
+is associated, and the opportunities that are open to it - in a word,
+on the circumstances of its environment.&rdquo; <a name="citation101a"></a><a href="#footnote101a">{101a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Of course by &ldquo;moral qualities,&rdquo; a character without spot
+or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted.&nbsp; Otherwise,
+I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that
+what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it,
+and with &ldquo;the circumstances of its environment.&rdquo;&nbsp; Without
+the &ldquo;environment,&rdquo; no Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc, - without the
+environment, no Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of &ldquo;the
+light people,&rdquo; the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by
+literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the
+productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and,
+above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers&rsquo;
+tales, the seamen&rsquo;s company, the vision of the Court, the gallants,
+the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in
+the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was.&nbsp; Not
+as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William
+does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob.&nbsp; Like
+Alceste (in <i>Le Misanthrope </i>of Poquelin), he might say,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>L</i>&rsquo;<i>Ami du genre humain n</i>&rsquo;<i>est point
+du tout mon fait.</i>&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob.&nbsp; This
+reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study-haunting,
+or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon
+make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers,
+and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s crowd of people hanging loose on the town?<br>
+<br>
+It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners
+of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and conventional),
+than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of what is called
+&ldquo;low life.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+If you reply, as regards Bacon, &ldquo;his genius divined the Costards
+and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs,
+and carters, from a hint or two, a glance,&rdquo; I answer that Will
+had much better sources for <i>them </i>in his own experience of life,
+and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers - of whom, in
+the quick, he saw quite as much as Moli&egrave;re did of his <i>Marquis.<br>
+<br>
+</i>But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting
+for Bacon&rsquo;s pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by
+Lord Penzance, that aged Judge.&nbsp; The way is short.&nbsp; These
+pictures of rural life and character were interpolated into the plays
+of Bacon by his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, &ldquo;who prepared
+the plays for the stage.&rdquo;&nbsp; This brilliant suggestion is borrowed
+from Mr. Appleton Morgan. <a name="citation103a"></a><a href="#footnote103a">{103a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it <i>is </i>difficult
+to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects
+of character which he could scarcely draw &ldquo;from the life.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians
+cited give the honour to the actor, &ldquo;who prepared the plays for
+the stage.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I believe
+in &ldquo;Genius.&rdquo;&nbsp; Shakespeare and Moli&egrave;re did not
+live in &ldquo;Society,&rdquo; though both rubbed shoulders with it,
+or looked at it over the invisible barrier between the actor and the
+great people in whose houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer.&nbsp;
+The rest they divined, by genius.<br>
+<br>
+Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.
+Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not
+at Court, not in the study, did he meet them.&nbsp; How then did he
+create his multitude of very low-lived persons?&nbsp; Rustics and rural
+constables he <i>may </i>have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for
+his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company.&nbsp;
+So you have to admit &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; - the miracle of &ldquo;Genius&rdquo;
+in your Bacon, - to an even greater extent than I need it in the case
+of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated
+with Bacon.<br>
+<br>
+Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very
+different genius, education, and environment.&nbsp; Burns could easily
+get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare
+at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics.&nbsp; Suppose him to be
+a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist.&nbsp; Tradition at Stratford
+says something about the humorist, and tradition, <i>in similar circumstances</i>,<i>
+</i>would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy
+years.<br>
+<br>
+Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged
+to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen,
+to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles,
+with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney.&nbsp; Some sorts
+of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so
+lightly as Burns did, - some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot
+at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was
+in troubles many.&nbsp; Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main
+chance.&nbsp; Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering,
+if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory.&nbsp;
+His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that
+frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.<br>
+<br>
+Something must be done!&nbsp; Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not
+deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may
+have seen and talked with them, and been attracted.&nbsp; He was a practical
+man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading
+straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising
+a small brigade of boys as his deputies.&nbsp; According to Ben Jonson
+he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent,
+that terrible bar!&nbsp; The actors find that out; he is admitted within
+the house as a &ldquo;servitor&rdquo; - a call-boy, if you like; an
+apprentice, if you please.<br>
+<br>
+By 1592, when Greene wrote his <i>Groatsworth</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;Shakescene&rdquo;
+thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor,
+he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member
+of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene&rsquo;s three author
+friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights;
+the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.<br>
+<br>
+Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say,
+five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with
+the stage.&nbsp; Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a
+good deal of very mixed society - writing men, bookish young blades,
+young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the
+custom of the gallants.<br>
+<br>
+What follows?&nbsp; Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps,
+after the play, if an actor seems to be good company.&nbsp; This is
+quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty
+as to stand aloof from any amusing company.&nbsp; They found it among
+prize-fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the
+fact that he was a lord.&nbsp; Moreover there were no women on the stage
+to distract the attention of the gallants.&nbsp; The players, says Asinius
+Lupus, in Jonson&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;corrupt young
+gentry very much, I know it.&rdquo;&nbsp; I take the quotation from
+Mr. Greenwood. <a name="citation106a"></a><a href="#footnote106a">{106a}</a>&nbsp;
+They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate
+with them.&nbsp; From Ben&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>,<i> </i>which bristles
+with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also quotes a railing address
+by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor, &ldquo;There are some
+of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha&rsquo;
+some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests;
+<i>and are companions for gallants</i>.&nbsp; A man may skelder ye,
+now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so.&rdquo; <a name="citation107a"></a><a href="#footnote107a">{107a}</a>&nbsp;
+We think of Nigel Olifaunt in <i>The Fortunes of Nigel; </i>but better
+gallants might choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship
+with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding
+of human nature.&nbsp; The players were, when unprotected by men of
+rank, &ldquo;vagabonds.&rdquo;&nbsp; The citizens of London, mainly
+Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans.&nbsp;
+The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and
+great houses.&nbsp; The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their
+acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights.&nbsp;
+Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge &ldquo;Parnassus&rdquo;
+plays of <i>c</i>. 1600-2.&nbsp; In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted
+Dogberry in Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, and was in favour, says Heywood,
+with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: &ldquo;For
+Londoners, who of more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe?&nbsp;
+He is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be,
+as much &ldquo;in Society&rdquo; as is possible for a mere literary
+man.&nbsp; I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour.&nbsp;
+He was a man&rsquo;s man, a peer might be interested in him as easily
+as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, <i>que s&ccedil;ais-je</i>?&nbsp;
+Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested,
+interested in a better way.<br>
+<br>
+In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human nature,
+I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome, popular
+Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested himself
+in the poet.&nbsp; There followed the dedication to the Earl of <i>Venus
+and Adonis; </i>a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an
+Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate.&nbsp;
+The mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that
+of <i>Lucrece</i>,<i> </i>proves that the Earl did not share the surprise
+of Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew
+the real concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym.&nbsp; But
+of the hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said.&nbsp;
+Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable
+to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we
+are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have left
+any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.<br>
+<br>
+This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair.&nbsp;
+But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or &ldquo;patronage&rdquo;
+of Southampton &ldquo;not a scrap of evidence exists.&rdquo; <a name="citation109a"></a><a href="#footnote109a">{109a}</a>&nbsp;
+Where would Mr. Greenwood expect to find a scrap of evidence?&nbsp;
+In literary anecdote?&nbsp; Of contemporary literary anecdote about
+Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and Fletcher,
+there is none, or next to none.&nbsp; There is the tradition that Southampton
+gave the poet &pound;1000 towards a purchase to which he had a mind.&nbsp;
+(Rowe seems to have got this from Davenant, - through Betterton.)&nbsp;
+In what documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of evidence?&nbsp;
+Perhaps in Southampton&rsquo;s book of his expenditure, and that does
+not exist.&nbsp; It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find
+him, poor as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.<br>
+<br>
+As to the chances of an actor&rsquo;s knowing &ldquo;smart people,&rdquo;
+Heywood, who knew all that world, tells us <a name="citation109b"></a><a href="#footnote109b">{109b}</a>
+that &ldquo;Tarleton, in his time, was gracious with the Queen, his
+sovereign,&rdquo; Queen Elizabeth.&nbsp; &ldquo;Will Kempe was in the
+favour of his sovereign.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>They </i>had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians.&nbsp;
+I am not pretending that, though his<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;flights upon the banks of Thames<br>
+So did take Eliza and our James,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Will Shakspere &ldquo;was gracious with the Queen.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players
+address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.&nbsp; They have the audacity
+to say nothing about having asked and received permission to dedicate.&nbsp;
+They say that the Earls &ldquo;have prosecuted both the plays and their
+authour living&rdquo; (while in life) &ldquo;with much favour.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+They &ldquo;have collected and published the works of &lsquo;the dead&rsquo;
+. . . only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow&rdquo;
+(associate) &ldquo;as was our Shakespeare, &lsquo;your servant Shakespeare.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor&rsquo;s
+authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls
+held him.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation110a"></a><a href="#footnote110a">{110a}</a>
+supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains an allusion to
+a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny.&nbsp; Be that
+as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke
+and Montgomery.&nbsp; To <i>them </i>it cannot lie; <i>they </i>know
+whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or
+not, that the plays were their &ldquo;servant&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+How is Mr. Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors,
+to the identity of their late &ldquo;Fellow&rdquo; the player, with
+the author; and to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and
+his compositions?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may
+reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which the players
+signed. <a name="citation111a"></a><a href="#footnote111a">{111a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare,
+the dedication does not say in so many words.&nbsp; They had seen his
+plays and had &ldquo;favoured&rdquo; both him and them, with so much
+favour, had &ldquo;used indulgence&rdquo; to the author.&nbsp; That
+is not nearly explicit enough for the precise Baconians.&nbsp; But the
+Earls knew whether what was said were true or false.&nbsp; I am not
+sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been duped as to the
+authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian
+joke and mystery - that &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; the author
+is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written
+in legal documents as &ldquo;William Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere
+was acting in a company (1592-3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote <i>Venus
+and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>and, signing &ldquo;W. Shakspeare,&rdquo; dedicated
+it to his young friend, the Earl, promising to add &ldquo;some graver
+labour,&rdquo; a promise fulfilled in <i>Lucrece</i>.&nbsp; In 1593,
+Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young
+and beautiful Earl - the Earl of Essex, not of Southampton: to Essex
+he did not dedicate his two poems (if <i>Venus </i>and <i>Lucrece </i>were
+his).&nbsp; He &ldquo;did nothing but ruminate&rdquo; (he tells the
+world) on Essex.&nbsp; How Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Unknown was occupied
+in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.<br>
+<br>
+I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much schooling
+as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in London, about
+the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be the rising
+player-author alluded to as &ldquo;Shakescene.&rdquo;&nbsp; There remains
+a difficulty.&nbsp; By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of <i>thirteen
+</i>plays, or even of six.&nbsp; But I have not credited him with the
+authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, <i>Hamlet</i>,<i>
+Romeo and Juliet</i>,<i> Midsummer Night</i>&rsquo;<i>s Dream</i>,<i>
+Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> Comedy of Errors</i>,<i> Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i> King John</i>,<i> </i>the three plays
+of <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>and <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation112a"></a><a href="#footnote112a">{112a}</a>
+cites Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end
+of 1592 &ldquo;some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,&rdquo;
+and for Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s opinion that eleven had been composed.<br>
+<br>
+If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we
+have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I should
+be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed, in these
+five years, by Will.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;Some of the
+dates are disputable&rdquo;; and, for himself, would omit &ldquo;<i>Titus
+Andronicus</i>,<i> </i>the three plays of <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>and
+possibly also <i>The Taming of the Shrew</i>,<i> </i>while the reference
+to <i>Hamlet </i>also is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very doubtful
+force.&rdquo; <a name="citation113a"></a><a href="#footnote113a">{113a}</a>&nbsp;
+This leaves us with six of Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s list of earliest plays
+put out of action.&nbsp; The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous
+enough to stagger my credulity remain.<br>
+<br>
+I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592-3
+was the ex-butcher&rsquo;s boy.&nbsp; Meanwhile these five plays, written
+by somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+book <a name="citation113b"></a><a href="#footnote113b">{113b}</a> with
+Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he be
+a &ldquo;Stratfordian.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Will, even Will,&rdquo; says
+the Stratfordian, &ldquo;could not have composed the five, much less
+the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed&rsquo;s thirteen &lsquo;before
+1592.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation113c"></a><a href="#footnote113c">{113c}</a>&nbsp;
+But, at the close of his work <a name="citation113d"></a><a href="#footnote113d">{113d}</a>
+Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean
+plays &ldquo;before 1592&rdquo; as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian
+of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of <i>feu </i>Mr. Bludyer
+of <i>The Tomahawk.<br>
+<br>
+</i>From the five plays left to Shakespeare&rsquo;s account in p. 51,
+<i>King John </i>(as we know it) is now eliminated.&nbsp; &ldquo;I find
+it impossible to believe that the same man was the author of the drama&rdquo;
+(<i>The Troublesome Reign of King John</i>)<i> </i>&ldquo;published
+in 1591, and that which, so far as we know, first saw the light in the
+Folio of 1623 . . .&nbsp; Hardly a single line of the original version
+reappears in the <i>King John </i>of Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a name="citation114a"></a><a href="#footnote114a">{114a}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I think it is a mistake to endeavour to fortify the argument
+against him&rdquo; (my Will, <i>toi que j</i>&rsquo;<i>aime</i>),<i>
+</i>&ldquo;by ascribing to Shakespeare such old plays as the <i>King
+John </i>of 1591 or the primitive <i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo; <a name="citation114b"></a><a href="#footnote114b">{114b}</a><br>
+<br>
+I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw <i>King John </i>apparently
+still &ldquo;coloured on the card&rdquo; among &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+lot.&rdquo;&nbsp; We are now left with <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> Midsummer Night</i>&rsquo;<i>s Dream</i>,<i> Comedy of
+Errors</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>,<i> </i>out of Dr. Furnivall&rsquo;s
+list of plays up to 1593.&nbsp; The phantom force of miraculously early
+plays is &ldquo;following darkness like a dream.&rdquo;&nbsp; We do
+not know the date of <i>A Midsummer Night</i>&rsquo;<i>s Dream</i>,<i>
+</i>we do not know the date of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.&nbsp; Mr. Gollancz
+dates the former &ldquo;about 1592,&rdquo; and the latter &ldquo;at
+1591.&rdquo; <a name="citation114c"></a><a href="#footnote114c">{114c}</a>&nbsp;
+This is a mere personal speculation.&nbsp; Of <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i> </i>we only know that our version
+is one &ldquo;corrected and augmented&rdquo; by William Shakespeare
+in 1598.&nbsp; I dare say it is as early as 1591-2, in its older form.&nbsp;
+Of <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>,<i> </i>Mr. Collins wrote, &ldquo;It
+is all but certain that it was written between 1589 and 1592, and it
+is quite certain that it was written before the end of 1594.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation114d"></a><a href="#footnote114d">{114d}</a><br>
+<br>
+The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished.&nbsp;
+The miracle is very considerably abated.&nbsp; In place of introducing
+the airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps,
+more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591-3.&nbsp;
+There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be
+credited by Stratfordians to Will.&nbsp; But even so, we have sufficient
+to &ldquo;give us pause,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, with justice.&nbsp;
+It gives <i>me </i>&ldquo;pause,&rdquo; if I am to believe that, between
+1587 and 1592, Will wrote <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> The Comedy of Errors</i>,<i> A Midsummer Night</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Dream</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>.&nbsp; There is a limit
+even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now
+possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man.&nbsp;
+But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VI: THE COURTLY PLAYS: &ldquo;LOVE&rsquo;S LABOUR&rsquo;S LOST&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We now come to consider another &ldquo;miracle&rdquo; discovered in
+the plays, - a miracle if the actor be the author.&nbsp; The new portent
+is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies
+make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen
+and ladies in the plays.&nbsp; To be sure the refinement in the jests
+is often conspicuously absent.&nbsp; How could the rude actor learn
+his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits?&nbsp; This question
+I have tried to answer already, - the whole of these fashions abound
+in the literature of the day.<br>
+<br>
+Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the
+ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse, whether
+in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he himself
+frequented their society.&nbsp; Marlowe did not frequent the best society;
+<i>he </i>was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in the
+speeches of the great and noble in <i>Edward II</i>.&nbsp; Courtiers
+and kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in
+blank verse.&nbsp; The style is a poetical convention, while the quips
+and conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of
+the age of Lyly and his <i>Euphues </i>and his comedies, the age of
+the <i>Arcadia.<br>
+<br>
+</i>A cheap and probable source of Will&rsquo;s courtliness is to be
+found in the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately
+printed between 1584 and 1592.&nbsp; Lyly&rsquo;s &ldquo;real significance
+is that he was the first to bring together on the English stage the
+elements of high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+<i>Much Ado about Nothing </i>and <i>As You Like It</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(and
+<i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i> </i>one may
+add).&nbsp; &ldquo;Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can
+hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly&rsquo;s
+plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny&rsquo;s <i>Natural History.
+</i>. . .&nbsp; One could hardly imagine <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost </i>as existent in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly&rsquo;s
+work just preceded it.&rdquo; <a name="citation120a"></a><a href="#footnote120a">{120a}</a><br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;It is to Lyly&rsquo;s plays,&rdquo; writes Dr. Landmann, &ldquo;that
+Shakespeare owes so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness
+of expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms, quibbles,
+and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as well as in
+his tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp; There follows a dissertation on the affected
+styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the <i>Pl&eacute;iade </i>in France,
+and generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we
+reach Lyly, &ldquo;in whose comedies,&rdquo; says Dr. Furness, &ldquo;I
+think we should look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation121a"></a><a href="#footnote121a">{121a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and
+court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature
+than at Court, decide that the poet of <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost </i>was not Will, but the courtly &ldquo;concealed poet.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald <a name="citation121b"></a><a href="#footnote121b">{121b}</a>
+that &ldquo;Bacon wrote Marlowe,&rdquo; and, by parity of reasoning
+many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring
+into Lyly&rsquo;s comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits
+of his own courtly youth.&nbsp; &ldquo;What for no?&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, &ldquo;Bacon wrote Marlowe,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Bacon wrote Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore
+the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and
+are noted even in short educational histories of English literature.&nbsp;
+Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls,
+to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly&rsquo;s plays, and read
+the poems of the time.&nbsp; I am taking him not to be a dullard but
+a poet.&nbsp; It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius,
+not only to catch the manner of Lyly&rsquo;s Court comedies, and &ldquo;Marlowe&rsquo;s
+mighty line&rdquo; (Marlowe was not &ldquo;brought up on the knees of
+Marchionesses&rdquo;!), but to improve on them.&nbsp; People did not
+commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did not write
+in the poetic convention.&nbsp; Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth
+talked and wrote, as a rule (we have abundance of their letters), like
+women of this world.&nbsp; There is a curious exception in Letter VIII
+of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell.&nbsp; In this (we have
+a copy of the original French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured
+style already practised by <i>Les Pr&eacute;cieuses </i>of her day;
+and expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon.&nbsp; If courtiers
+of both sexes conversed in the style of <i>Euphues </i>(which is improbable),
+they learned the trick of it from <i>Euphues; </i>not the author of
+<i>Euphues </i>from them.&nbsp; Lyly&rsquo;s most popular prose was
+accessible to Shakespeare.&nbsp; The whole convention as to how the
+great should speak and bear themselves was accessible in poetry and
+the drama.&nbsp; A man of genius naturally made his ladies and courtiers
+more witty, more &ldquo;conceited,&rdquo; more eloquent, more gracious
+than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.<br>
+<br>
+It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts
+so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon, intimately
+familiar with the society of the great, could make the great speak as,
+in the plays, they do - and as in real life they probably did <i>not</i>!<br>
+<br>
+We now look at <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i>
+</i>published in quarto, in 1598, as &ldquo;corrected and augmented
+by W. Shakespere.&rdquo;&nbsp; The date of composition is unknown, but
+the many varieties of versification, with some allusions, mark it as
+among the earliest of the dramas.&nbsp; Supposing that Shakespeare obtained
+his knowledge of fine manners and speech, and of the tedious quips and
+conceits which he satirises, from the contemporary poems, plays, and
+novels which abounded in them, and from <i>pr&eacute;cieux </i>and <i>pr&eacute;cieuses
+</i>who imitated them, as I suggest, even then <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost </i>is an extremely eccentric piece.&nbsp;
+I cannot imagine how a man who knew the foreign politics of his age
+as Bacon did, could have dreamed of writing anything so eccentric, that
+is, if it has any connection with foreign politics of the time.<br>
+<br>
+The scene is the Court of <i>Ferdinand</i>,<i> </i>King of Navarre.&nbsp;
+In 1589-93, the eyes of England were fixed on the Court of her ally,
+<i>Henri </i>of Navarre, in his struggle with the League and the Guises;
+the War of Religion.&nbsp; But the poet calls the King &ldquo;Ferdinand,&rdquo;
+taking perhaps from some story this non-existent son of Charles III
+of Navarre (died 1425): to whom, according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian
+chronicler of that time, the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold.&nbsp;
+This is a transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the
+presence of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre
+in the play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and has the air
+of being borrowed from some lost story or brief novel.&nbsp; Bacon&rsquo;s
+brother, Anthony, was English minister at the Court of Navarre.&nbsp;
+What could tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of
+Navarre, plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc, and make
+him, at that period, found an Academe for three years of austere study
+and absence of women?&nbsp; But, if Bacon did this, what could induce
+him to give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Mar&eacute;chal
+de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in 1589-93, the chief adherents
+of Henri of Navarre), and add to them &ldquo;Dumain,&rdquo; that is,
+the Duc de Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and
+of the Huguenots?&nbsp; Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare,
+the freak is of the most eccentric, - but in Bacon this friskiness is
+indeed strange.&nbsp; I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation124a"></a><a href="#footnote124a">{124a}</a>
+find any &ldquo;allusions to the Civil War of France.&rdquo;&nbsp; France
+and Navarre, in the play, are in full peace.<br>
+<br>
+The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about
+1430.&nbsp; By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne,
+and Bankes&rsquo;s celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the
+date to 1591.&nbsp; But the Navarre of the play is a region &ldquo;out
+of space, out of time,&rdquo; a fairy world of projected Academes (like
+that of the four young men in de la Primaudaye&rsquo;s <i>L</i>&rsquo;<i>Acad&eacute;mie
+Fran&ccedil;aise</i>,<i> </i>Englished in 1586) and of peace, while
+the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was engaged in a struggle for life
+and faith; and in his ceaseless amours.<br>
+<br>
+Many of Shakespeare&rsquo;s anachronisms are easily intelligible.&nbsp;
+He takes a novel or story about any remote period, or he chooses, as
+for the <i>Midsummer Night</i>&rsquo;<i>s Dream</i>,<i> </i>a period
+earlier than that of the Trojan war.&nbsp; He gives to the Athens contemporary
+with the &ldquo;Late Minoan III&rdquo; period (1600 B.C.?) a Duke, and
+his personages live like English nobles and rustics of his own day,
+among the fairies of English folk-lore.&nbsp; It is the manner of Chaucer
+and of the poets and painters of any age before the end of the eighteenth
+century.&nbsp; The resulting anachronisms are natural and intelligible.&nbsp;
+We do not expect war-chariots in <i>Troilus and Cressida; </i>it is
+when the author makes the bronze-clad Ach&aelig;ans familiar with Plato
+and Aristotle that we are surprised.&nbsp; In <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost </i>we do not expect the author to introduce
+the manners of the early fifteenth century, the date of the affair of
+the 200,000 ducats.&nbsp; Let the play reflect the men and manners of
+1589-93, - but why place Mayenne, a fanatical Catholic foe of Navarre,
+among the courtiers of the Huguenot King of Navarre?<br>
+<br>
+As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day Dumain) appearing
+as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri, Bacon, of all men, could
+not have made that absurd error.&nbsp; It was Shakespeare who took but
+an absent-minded interest in foreign politics.&nbsp; If Bacon is building
+his play on an affair, the ducats, of 1425-35 (roughly speaking), he
+should not bring in a performing horse, trained by Bankes, a Staffordshire
+man, which was performing its tricks at Shrewsbury - in 1591. <a name="citation126a"></a><a href="#footnote126a">{126a}</a>&nbsp;
+Thus early we find that great scholar mixing up chronology in a way
+which, in Shakespeare even, surprises; but, in Bacon, seems quite out
+of keeping.<br>
+<br>
+Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as &ldquo;Dumain,&rdquo;
+- Mayenne, &ldquo;whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular
+accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre&rsquo;s movements
+that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Bacon would not have been so led!&nbsp; As Mayenne and Henri fought
+against each other at Ivry, in 1590, this was carrying nonsense far,
+even for Will, but for the earnestly instructive Bacon!<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The habits of the author could not have been more scholastic,&rdquo;
+so Judge Webb is quoted, &ldquo;if he had, like Bacon, spent three years
+in the University of Cambridge . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; Bacon, or whoever
+corrected the play in 1598, might have corrected &ldquo;primater&rdquo;
+into &ldquo;pia mater,&rdquo; unless Bacon intended the blunder for
+a malapropism of &ldquo;Nathaniel, a Curate.&rdquo;&nbsp; Either Will
+or Bacon, either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common
+Italian proverb on Venice into gibberish.&nbsp; It was familiar in Florio&rsquo;s
+<i>Second Frutes </i>(1591), and <i>First Frutes </i>(1578), with the
+English translation.&nbsp; The books were as accessible to Shakspere
+as to Bacon.&nbsp; Either author might also draw from James Sandford&rsquo;s
+<i>Garden of Pleasure</i>,<i> </i>done out of the Italian in 1573-6.<br>
+<br>
+Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be discovered
+in this play, I know not, unless it be in Biron&rsquo;s witty speech
+against study.&nbsp; If the wit implies in the author a Cambridge education,
+Costard and Dull and Holofernes imply familiarity with rustics and country
+schoolmasters.&nbsp; Where the author proves that he &ldquo;could not
+have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had
+spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to France,&rdquo; I
+cannot conjecture.&nbsp; <i>There are no French politics in the piece</i>,<i>
+</i>any more than there are &ldquo;mysteries of fashionable life,&rdquo;
+such as Bacon might have heard of from Essex and Southampton.&nbsp;
+There is no &ldquo;familiarity with all the gossip of the Court&rdquo;;
+there is no greater knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got
+from common English books.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+One does not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age)
+made all these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood.
+<a name="citation127a"></a><a href="#footnote127a">{127a}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Like Bacon, the author of the play must have had a large command
+of books; he must have had his &ldquo;Horace,&rdquo; his &ldquo;Ovidius
+Naso,&rdquo; and his &ldquo;good old &lsquo;Mantuan.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What a prodigious &ldquo;command of books&rdquo;!&nbsp; Country schoolmasters
+confessedly had these books on the school desks.&nbsp; It was not even
+necessary for the author to &ldquo;have access to the <i>Chronicles
+</i>of Monstrelet.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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 <i>conte</i>,<i> </i>partly based on a
+passage in Monstrelet.<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps it will be conceded that <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost </i>is not a play which can easily be attributed to Bacon.&nbsp;
+We do not know how much of the play existed before Shakespeare &ldquo;augmented&rdquo;
+it in 1598.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Moli&egrave;re certainly corrected and
+augmented and transfigured, in his illustrious career in Paris, several
+of the brief early sketches which he had written when he was the chief
+of a strolling <i>troupe </i>in Southern France.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood does not attribute the wit (such as it is), the quips,
+the conceits, the affectations satirised in <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> </i>to Will&rsquo;s knowledge of the artificial style then
+prevalent in all the literatures of Western Europe, and in England most
+pleasingly used in Lyly&rsquo;s comedies.&nbsp; No, &ldquo;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 fashionable
+society of his time, as also with contemporary foreign politics.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation129a"></a><a href="#footnote129a">{129a}</a><br>
+<br>
+I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge of foreign
+politics.&nbsp; The embassy 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.&nbsp; I do not see in the embassy of the Princess of the story
+any &ldquo;intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics&rdquo;
+about 1591-3.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I am not aware that the author shows any &ldquo;intimate acquaintance
+with the ways&rdquo; of Elizabeth&rsquo;s Court, or of any other fashionable
+society, except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation129b"></a><a href="#footnote129b">{129b}</a>
+appears to be repeating &ldquo;the case as to this very remarkable play&rdquo;
+as &ldquo;well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his <i>Mystery of
+William Shakespeare</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(p. 44).&nbsp; In that paralysing
+judicial summary, as we have seen, &ldquo;the author could not have
+been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent
+three years in the train of an Ambassador to France.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Such was not the Navarre of Henri
+in his war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the sex!<br>
+<br>
+Such are the &ldquo;contemporary foreign politics,&rdquo; the &ldquo;French
+politics&rdquo; which the author knows - as intimately as Bacon might
+have known them.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+These, then, are the arguments in favour of Bacon, or the Great Unknown,
+which are offered with perfect solemnity of assurance: and the Baconians
+repeat them in their little books of popularisation and propaganda.&nbsp;
+<i>Quantula sapientia</i>!<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VII: CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS AUTHOR<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;Concealed Poet&rdquo; who really,
+at first, did the additions and changes in the Company&rsquo;s older
+manuscript plays, and of the inconceivably impudent pretences of Will
+of Stratford, would have kept the town merry for a month.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties in their
+assumed literary hoax.&nbsp; If Will, like the old Hermit of Prague
+who never saw pen and ink, could not even write, the hoax was a physical
+impossibility.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+I am surprised that the Baconians have never made that point.&nbsp;
+Will&rsquo;s &ldquo;copy&rdquo; was almost without blot or erasion,
+the other actors were wont to boast.&nbsp; Really the absence of erasions
+and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will was
+<i>not </i>the author.&nbsp; Will merely copied the fair copies handed
+to him by the concealed poet.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The whole story is like the dream of a child.&nbsp; We therefore expect
+the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the evidence of Jonson, Heywood,
+Heminge, and Condell.&nbsp; Their attempts take the shape of the most
+extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to
+Ben&rsquo;s various estimates of the <i>merits </i>of the plays.&nbsp;
+He is constant in his witness to the authorship.&nbsp; To these efforts
+of despair we return later, when we hope to justify what is here deliberately
+advanced.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile we study Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Not very many literary allusions remain, made during Will&rsquo;s life-time,
+to the plays of Shakespeare.&nbsp; The writers, usually, speak of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;W. Shakespeare,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Will Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+and leave it there.&nbsp; In the same way, when they speak of other
+contemporaries, they name them, - and leave it there, without telling
+us &ldquo;who&rdquo; (Frank) Beaumont, or (Kit) Marlowe, or (Robin)
+Greene, or (Jack) Fletcher, or any of the others &ldquo;were.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+All interested readers knew who they were: and also knew who &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+or &ldquo;Will Shakespeare&rdquo; was.&nbsp; No other Will Shak(&amp;c.)
+was prominently before the literary and dramatic world, in 1592-1616,
+except the Warwickshire provincial who played with Burbage.<br>
+<br>
+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 identity does not
+satisfy Mr. Greenwood, and the Baconians, where Will is concerned.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;We should expect to find allusions to dramatic and poetical works
+published under the name of &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;; 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.&nbsp; And these, of course, we do find; but these are not the
+objects of our quest.&nbsp; What we require is evidence to establish
+the identity of the player with the poet and dramatist; to prove that
+the player was the author of the <i>Plays </i>and <i>Poems.&nbsp; That
+</i>is the proposition to be established, and <i>that </i>the allusions
+fail, as it appears to me, to prove,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp;
+He adds, &ldquo;At any rate they do not disprove the theory that the
+true authorship was hidden under a pseudonym&rdquo; <a name="citation136a"></a><a href="#footnote136a">{136a}</a>
+- which raises an entirely different question.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; But even if the makers of allusions did
+all this, and said, &ldquo;by W. Shakespeare the poet, we mean W. Shakespeare
+the actor&rdquo;<i> - that </i>is not enough.&nbsp; For they may all
+be deceived, may all believe that a bookless, untutored man is the author.&nbsp;
+So we cannot get evidence correct enough for Mr. Greenwood.<br>
+<br>
+Destitute 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.&nbsp; Still, I am, like other readers, on
+the Jury addressed, - I do not accept the arguments.&nbsp; <i>Miror
+magis</i>,<i> </i>as Mr. Greenwood might quote Latin.&nbsp; We have
+already seen one example of this argument, when Heywood speaks of the
+author of poems by Shakespeare, published in <i>The Passionate Pilgrim</i>.&nbsp;
+Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the author
+Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; I shall prove that, elsewhere,
+Heywood does identify them, and no man knew more of the world of playwrights
+and actors than Heywood.&nbsp; I add that in his remarks on <i>The Passionate
+Pilgrim</i>,<i> </i>Heywood had no need to say &ldquo;by W. Shakespeare
+I mean the well-known actor in the King&rsquo;s Company.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There was no other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.<br>
+<br>
+It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above,
+that the allusions &ldquo;disprove the theory that the true authorship
+was hidden under a pseudonym.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is an entirely different
+question.&nbsp; He is now starting quite another hare.&nbsp; Men of
+letters who alluded to the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant
+the actor; that is my position.&nbsp; That they may all have been mistaken:
+that &ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo; was Bacon&rsquo;s, or any one&rsquo;s
+pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not
+allow the critic to glide away into it through an &ldquo;at any rate&rdquo;;
+as he does three or four times.&nbsp; So far, then, Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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,
+&ldquo;This Warwickshire man cannot be the author.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere,
+real or supposed,&rdquo; says the critic. <a name="citation138a"></a><a href="#footnote138a">{138a}</a>&nbsp;
+He begins with the hackneyed words of the dying man of letters, Robert
+Greene, in <i>A Groatsworth of Wit </i>(1592).&nbsp; The pamphlet is
+addressed to Gentlemen of his acquaintance &ldquo;that spend their wits
+in making plays&rdquo;; he &ldquo;wisheth them a better exercise,&rdquo;
+and better fortunes than his own.&nbsp; (Marlowe is supposed to be one
+of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such suppositions do not here
+concern us.)&nbsp; Greene&rsquo;s is the ancient feud between the players
+and the authors, between capital and labour.&nbsp; The players are the
+capitalists, and buy the plays out and out, - cheap.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Women fall in love
+with the actors, not with the authors; but with &ldquo;those puppets,&rdquo;
+as Greene says, &ldquo;that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished
+in our colours.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of
+the same complaints, - most natural in the circumstances: though he
+managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know.&nbsp;
+Greene adds that in his misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully
+&ldquo;forsaken,&rdquo; by the players, and warns his friends that such
+may be <i>their </i>lot; advising them to seek &ldquo;some better exercise.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He then writes - and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I think,
+but misunderstood it has been - &ldquo;Yes, trust them not&rdquo; (trust
+not the players), &ldquo;FOR there is an upstart crow, beautified with
+our feathers, that with his <i>Tyger</i>&rsquo;<i>s heart wrapt in a
+Player</i>&rsquo;<i>s hide</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(&ldquo;Player&rsquo;s&rdquo;
+in place of &ldquo;woman&rsquo;s,&rdquo; in an old play, <i>The Tragedy
+of Richard</i>,<i> Duke of York</i>,<i> </i>&amp;c.), &ldquo;supposes
+he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you;
+and being an absolute <i>Johannes Factotum</i>,<i> </i>is in his own
+conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The meaning is pellucid.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do not trust the players, my fellow
+playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in addition to
+their glory gained by mouthing <i>our </i>words, and their ingratitude,
+may now forsake you for one of themselves, a player, who thinks his
+blank verse as good as the best of yours&rdquo; (including Marlowe&rsquo;s,
+probably).&nbsp; &ldquo;The man is ready at their call (&ldquo;an absolute
+<i>Johannes Factotum</i>&rdquo;)<i>.&nbsp; </i>&ldquo;In his own conceit&rdquo;
+he is &ldquo;the only Shake-scene in a country.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Seek
+you better masters,&rdquo; than these players, who have now an author
+among themselves, &ldquo;the only Shake-scene,&rdquo; where the pun
+on Shakespeare does not look like a fortuitous coincidence.&nbsp; But
+it may be, anything may happen.<br>
+<br>
+The sense, I repeat, is pellucid.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood writes that
+if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare &ldquo;it seems clear that
+it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.&rdquo; <a name="citation140a"></a><a href="#footnote140a">{140a}</a>&nbsp;
+As an <i>actor </i>the person alluded to is merely assailed with the
+other actors, his &ldquo;fellows.&rdquo;&nbsp; But he is picked out
+as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the
+players, &ldquo;<i>for </i>there is&rdquo; among themselves, &ldquo;in
+a player&rsquo;s hide,&rdquo; &ldquo;an upstart crow&rdquo; - who thinks
+his blank verse as good as the best of theirs.&nbsp; He is, therefore,
+necessarily a playwright, and being a <i>factotum</i>,<i> </i>can readily
+be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene&rsquo;s three
+friends, who are professed playwrights.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood says that &ldquo;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.&rdquo; <a name="citation141a"></a><a href="#footnote141a">{141a}</a>&nbsp;
+But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us.&nbsp; In addition
+to gaining renown solely through mouthing &ldquo;<i>our</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>words, wearing &ldquo;<i>our </i>feathers,&rdquo; they have been
+bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will,
+in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; &ldquo;yes,
+for they now have&rdquo; an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous
+rival, in their own fellowship.&nbsp; Thus we know with absolute certainty
+why Greene wrote as he did.&nbsp; He says nothing about the superior
+financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have
+been the &ldquo;only&rdquo; cause of his bitterness.&nbsp; Greene gives
+its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later,
+in his verses &ldquo;Poet-Ape&rdquo; (Playwright-Actor).&nbsp; Moreover,
+Mr. Greenwood gives Greene&rsquo;s obvious motives on the very page
+where he says that we do not know them.<br>
+<br>
+Even Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation141b"></a><a href="#footnote141b">{141b}</a>
+anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits
+that the words &ldquo;supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a
+blank verse as the best of you,&rdquo; &ldquo;do seem to have that implication,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation141c"></a><a href="#footnote141c">{141c}</a> namely,
+that &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; is a dramatic author: what else can the
+words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank
+verse?<br>
+<br>
+Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying &ldquo;it is clear that it is as
+an actor rather than as an author that &lsquo;Shake-scene&rsquo; is
+attacked,&rdquo; <a name="citation142a"></a><a href="#footnote142a">{142a}</a>
+concedes <a name="citation142b"></a><a href="#footnote142b">{142b}</a>
+that it &ldquo;certainly looks as if he&rdquo; (Greene) &ldquo;meant
+to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as
+well as to mouth verses.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nothing else can possibly be meant.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The rest of you&rdquo; were authors, not actors.<br>
+<br>
+If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo;
+alone be selected for a special victim?&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in the circumstances
+of the case, &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; is meant by Greene for a pun
+on &ldquo;Shake-speare,&rdquo; or not.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; That
+other player-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity.&nbsp;
+The term &ldquo;the only Shake-scene&rdquo; may be one of those curious
+coincidences which do occur.&nbsp; The presumption lies rather on the
+other side.&nbsp; I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling
+for his case says that, even assuming the validity of the surmise that
+there is an allusion to Shakspere, <a name="citation143a"></a><a href="#footnote143a">{143a}</a>
+&ldquo;the utmost that we should be entitled 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&rdquo; (the Great Unknown?).&nbsp; I do more than demur, I defy
+any man to exhibit that sense in Greene&rsquo;s words.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The utmost that we should be entitled to say,&rdquo; is, in my
+opinion, what we have no shadow of a title to say.&nbsp; Look at the
+poor hackneyed, tortured words of Greene again.&nbsp; &ldquo;Yes, trust
+them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,
+that with his <i>Tyger</i>&rsquo;<i>s heart wrapped in a player</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+hide</i>,<i> </i>supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank
+verse as the best of you; and being an absolute <i>Johannes Factotum</i>,<i>
+</i>is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+How can mortal man squeeze from these words the charge that &ldquo;Player
+Shakspere&rdquo; is &ldquo;putting forward, as his own, some work, or
+perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another&rdquo;?&nbsp;
+It is as an actor, with other actors, that the player is &ldquo;beautified
+with <i>our </i>feathers,&rdquo; - not with the feathers of some one<i>
+not </i>ourselves, Bacon or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Unknown.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood even says that Shake-scene is referred to &ldquo;as beautified
+with the feathers <i>which he has stolen </i>from the dramatic writers&rdquo;
+(&ldquo;our feathers&rdquo;)<i>.<br>
+<br>
+</i>Greene says absolutely nothing about feathers &ldquo;<i>which he
+has stolen</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; The &ldquo;feathers,&rdquo; the words of
+the plays, were bought, not stolen, by the actors, &ldquo;anticks garnished
+in our colours.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Tedious it is to write many words about words so few and simple as those
+of Greene; meaning &ldquo;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.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+But &ldquo;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,&rdquo; this is &ldquo;the utmost we
+should be entitled to say,&rdquo; even if the allusion be to Shakspere.&nbsp;
+How does Mr. Greenwood get the Anti-Willian hypothesis out of Greene&rsquo;s
+few and plain words?<br>
+<br>
+It is much safer for him to say that &ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; is not
+meant for Shakespeare.&nbsp; Nobody can prove that it <i>is; </i>the
+pun <i>may </i>be a strange coincidence, - or any one may say that he
+thinks it nothing more; if he pleases.<br>
+<br>
+Greene nowhere &ldquo;refers to this Shake-scene as being an impostor,
+an upstart crow beautified with the feathers <i>which he has stolen
+from the dramatic writers </i>(&ldquo;our feathers&rdquo;)&rdquo; <a name="citation145a"></a><a href="#footnote145a">{145a}</a>
+- that is, Greene makes no such reference to Shake-scene in his capacity
+of writer of blank verse.&nbsp; Like all players, who are all &ldquo;anticks
+garnisht in our colours,&rdquo; Shake-scene, <i>as player</i>,<i> </i>is
+&ldquo;beautified with our feathers.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is Mr. Greenwood
+who adds &ldquo;beautified with the feathers which he has <i>stolen
+</i>from the dramatic writers.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; We
+must take Greene&rsquo;s evidence as we find it, - it proves that by
+&ldquo;Shake-scene&rdquo; he means a &ldquo;poet-ape,&rdquo; a playwright-actor;
+for Greene, like Jonson, speaks of actors as &ldquo;apes.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Both men saw in a certain actor and dramatist a suspected rival.&nbsp;
+Only one such successful practising actor-playwright is known to us
+at this date (1592-1601), - and he is Shakespeare.&nbsp; Unless another
+such existed, Greene, in 1592, alludes to William Shak(&amp;c.) as a
+player and playwright.&nbsp; This proves that the actor from Stratford
+was accepted in Greene&rsquo;s world as an author of plays in blank
+verse.&nbsp; He cannot, therefore, have seemed incapable of his poetry.<br>
+<br>
+Let us now briefly consider other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare
+selected by Mr. Greenwood himself.&nbsp; No allusion can prove that
+Shakespeare was the author of the work attributed to him in the allusions.&nbsp;
+The plays and poems <i>may </i>have been by James VI and I, &ldquo;a
+parcel-poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+Omitting some remarks by Chettle on Greene&rsquo;s <i>Groatsworth of
+Wit</i>, <a name="citation146a"></a><a href="#footnote146a">{146a}</a>
+as, if grammar goes for all, they do not refer to Shakespeare, we have
+the Cambridge farce or comedy on contemporary literature, the <i>Return
+from Parnassus </i>(1602?).&nbsp; The University wits laugh at Shakespeare,
+- not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his <i>Venus and
+Adonis</i>,<i> </i>of a silly braggart pretender to literature, Gullio.<br>
+<br>
+They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+company, speaking to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare
+as a member of their company, who, <i>as an author of plays</i>,<i>
+</i>&ldquo;puts down&rdquo; the University wits &ldquo;and Ben Jonson
+too.&rdquo;&nbsp; The date is not earlier than that of Ben&rsquo;s satiric
+play on the poets, <i>The Poetaster </i>(1601), to which reference is
+made.&nbsp; Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant, his
+opinion of Shakespeare&rsquo;s pre-eminent merit only proves, as in
+the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the excellences
+of Shakespeare.&nbsp; In him they saw no scholar.<br>
+<br>
+The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor and author.<br>
+<br>
+All this &ldquo;is quite consistent with the theory that Shake-speare
+was a pseudonym,&rdquo; <a name="citation147a"></a><a href="#footnote147a">{147a}</a>
+says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; Of course it is, but it is <i>not </i>consistent
+with the theory that Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless rustic,
+for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an hour.&nbsp;
+Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if you will, that <i>he
+</i>thought that <i>Kempe </i>thought, that his fellow player was the
+author.&nbsp; But we have better evidence of what the actors thought
+than in the Cambridge play.<br>
+<br>
+In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in <i>Palladis Tamia </i>credits Shakespeare
+with <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>with privately circulated sonnets,
+and with a number of the comedies and tragedies.&nbsp; How the allusions
+&ldquo;negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a <i>nom de plume
+</i>is not apparent,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his
+method.&nbsp; I repeat that he wanders from the point, which is, here,
+that the only William Shak(&amp;c.) known to us at the time, in London,
+was credited with the plays and poems on all sides, which proves that
+no incompatibility between the man and the works was recognised.<br>
+<br>
+Then Weaver (1599)<i> </i>alludes to him as author of <i>Venus</i>,<i>
+Lucrece</i>,<i> Romeo</i>,<i> Richard</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;more whose
+names I know not.&rdquo;&nbsp; Davies (1610) calls him &ldquo;our English
+Terence&rdquo; (the famous comedian), and mentions him as having &ldquo;played
+some Kingly parts in sport.&rdquo;&nbsp; Freeman (1614) credits him
+with <i>Venus </i>and <i>Lucrece</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;Besides in plays
+thy wit winds like Meander.&rdquo;&nbsp; I repeat Heywood&rsquo;s evidence.&nbsp;
+Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable domestic play, <i>A Woman
+Killed with Kindness</i>,<i> </i>was, from the old days of Henslowe,
+in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and an actor; he survived into
+the reign of Charles I.&nbsp; Writing on the familiar names of the poets,
+&ldquo;Jack Fletcher,&rdquo; &ldquo;Frank Beaumont,&rdquo; &ldquo;Kit
+Marlowe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Tom Nash,&rdquo; he says,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill<br>
+Commanded mirth and passion, was but &lsquo;Will.&rsquo;&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author?&nbsp; No quibbles
+serve against the evidence.<br>
+<br>
+We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare&rsquo;s death,
+or invoke, at present, Ben Jonson&rsquo;s panegyric of 1623.&nbsp; As
+to Davies, his dull and obscure epigram is addressed &ldquo;To our English
+Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare.&rdquo;&nbsp; He accosts Shakespeare
+as &ldquo;Good Will.&rdquo;&nbsp; He remarks that, &ldquo;as some say,&rdquo;
+if Will &ldquo;had not played some Kingly parts in sport,&rdquo; he
+had been &ldquo;a companion for a <i>King</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>and &ldquo;been
+a King among the meaner sort.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nobody, now, can see the
+allusion and the joke.&nbsp; Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, in 1604, acted
+a play on the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600.&nbsp; King James suppressed
+the play after the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the
+stage throughout the action: and in very droll and dreadful situations.&nbsp;
+Did Will take the King&rsquo;s part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, &ldquo;as
+some say&rdquo;?&nbsp; Nobody knows.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood, to disable
+Davies&rsquo;s recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, &ldquo;Our English
+Terence,&rdquo; quotes, from Florio&rsquo;s <i>Montaigne</i>,<i> </i>a
+silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence&rsquo;s plays were
+written by Scipio and Laelius.&nbsp; In fact, Terence alludes in his
+prologue to the <i>Adelphi</i>,<i> </i>to a spiteful report that he
+was aided by great persons.&nbsp; The prologue may be the source of
+the fable - that does not matter.&nbsp; Davies might get the fable in
+Montaigne, and, knowing that some Great One wrote Will&rsquo;s plays,
+might therefore, in irony, address him as &ldquo;Our English Terence.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This is a pretty free conjecture!&nbsp; In Roman comedy he had only
+two names known to him to choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus.&nbsp;
+But if Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have shared
+<i>le Secret de Polichinelle</i>.&nbsp; Yet none hints at it, and only
+a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that
+Davies <i>knew</i>,<i> </i>and used &ldquo;Terence&rdquo; as a gibe.
+<a name="citation149a"></a><a href="#footnote149a">{149a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor wrote
+the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so, and therefore
+that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to demonstrate that he was
+incapable of the poetry and the knowledge displayed in his works.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when
+he makes Will incapable of writing.&nbsp; Such a Will could deceive
+no mortal. <a name="citation150a"></a><a href="#footnote150a">{150a}</a>&nbsp;
+But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays &ldquo;much
+learning, and remarkable classical attainments,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a wide
+familiarity with the classics,&rdquo; <a name="citation150b"></a><a href="#footnote150b">{150b}</a>
+suppose that his absolutely bookless Will could have persuaded his intimates
+that he was the author of plays exhibiting &ldquo;a wide familiarity
+with the classics,&rdquo; or &ldquo;remarkable classical attainments.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The thing is wholly impossible.<br>
+<br>
+I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to Shakespeare
+speaks of him as &ldquo;learned,&rdquo; erudite, scholarly, and so forth.&nbsp;
+The epithets for him are &ldquo;sweet,&rdquo; &ldquo;gentle,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;honeyed,&rdquo; &ldquo;sugared,&rdquo; &ldquo;honey-tongued&rdquo;
+- this is the convention.&nbsp; The tradition followed by Milton, who
+was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote <i>L</i>&rsquo;<i>Allegro
+</i>just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare &ldquo;sweetest
+Shakespeare, Fancy&rsquo;s child,&rdquo; with &ldquo;native wood-notes
+wild&rdquo;; and gives to Jonson &ldquo;the <i>learned </i>sock.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare,
+namely, in 1608.&nbsp; Like Milton he was a Cambridge man.&nbsp; The
+First Folio of Shakespeare&rsquo;s works appeared when each of these
+two bookish men was aged fifteen.&nbsp; It would necessarily revive
+interest in Shakespeare, now first known as far as about half of his
+plays went: he would be discussed among lovers of literature at Cambridge.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller&rsquo;s remark that Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;learning was very little,&rdquo; that, if alive, he would confess
+himself &ldquo;to be never any scholar.&rdquo; <a name="citation151a"></a><a href="#footnote151a">{151a}</a>&nbsp;
+I cannot grant that Fuller is dividing the persons of actor and author.&nbsp;
+Men of Shakespeare&rsquo;s generation, such as Jonson, did not think
+him learned; nor did men of the next generation.&nbsp; If Mr. Collins&rsquo;s
+view be correct, the men of Shakespeare&rsquo;s and of Milton&rsquo;s
+generations were too ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was deeply
+learned in the literature of Rome, and in the literature of Greece.&nbsp;
+Every one was too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VIII: &ldquo;THE SILENCE OF PHILIP HENSLOWE&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+When Shakespeare is mentioned as an author by contemporary writers,
+the Baconian stratagem, we have seen, is to cry, &ldquo;Ah, but you
+cannot prove the author mentioned to be the actor.&rdquo;&nbsp; We have
+seen that Meres (1598) speaks of Shakespeare as the leading tragic and
+comic poet (&ldquo;Poor poet-ape that would be thought our chief,&rdquo;
+quoth Jonson), as author of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>and as a
+sonneteer.&nbsp; &ldquo;All this does nothing whatever to support the
+idea that the Stratford player was the author of the plays and poems
+alluded to,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood, playing that card again. <a name="citation155a"></a><a href="#footnote155a">{155a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The allusions, I repeat, <i>do </i>prove that Shak(&amp;c.), the actor,
+was believed to be the author, till any other noted William Shak(&amp;c.)
+is found to have been conspicuously before the town.&nbsp; &ldquo;There
+is nothing at all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any
+personal knowledge of Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is nothing at
+all to prove that Meres, native of Lincolnshire, had any personal knowledge
+of nine-tenths of the English authors, famous or forgotten, whom he
+mentions.&nbsp; &ldquo;On the question - who was Shakespeare? - he throws
+no light.&rdquo;&nbsp; He &ldquo;throws no light on the question&rdquo;
+&ldquo;who was?&rdquo; any of the poets mentioned by him, except one,
+quite forgotten, whose College he names . . . To myself this &ldquo;sad
+repeated air,&rdquo; - &ldquo;critics who praise Shakespeare do not
+say <i>who Shakespeare </i>was,&rdquo; - would appear to be, not an
+argument, but a subterfuge: though Mr. Greenwood honestly believes it
+to be an argument, - otherwise he would not use it: much less would
+he repeat it with frequent iteration.&nbsp; The more a man was notorious,
+as was Will Shakspere the actor, the less the need for any critic to
+tell his public &ldquo;who Shakespeare was.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+As Mr. Greenwood tries to disable the evidence when Shakespeare is alluded
+to as an author, so he tries to better his case when, in the account-book
+of Philip Henslowe, an owner of theatres, money-lender, pawn-broker,
+purchaser of plays from authors, and so forth, Shakespeare is <i>not
+</i>mentioned at all.&nbsp; Here is a mystery which, properly handled,
+may advance the great cause.&nbsp; Henslowe has notes of loans of money
+to several actors, some of them of Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, &ldquo;The
+Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; There is no such note of a loan
+to Shakespeare.&nbsp; Does this prove that he was not an actor?&nbsp;
+If so, Burbage was not an actor; Henslowe never names him.<br>
+<br>
+There are notes of payments of money to Henslowe after each performance
+of any play in one of his theatres.&nbsp; In these notes <i>the name
+of Shakespeare is never once mentioned as the author of any play</i>.&nbsp;
+How weird!&nbsp; But in <i>these </i>notes the names of the authors
+of the plays acted are never mentioned.&nbsp; Does this suggest that
+Bacon wrote all these plays?<br>
+<br>
+On the other hand, there are frequent mentions of advances of money
+to authors who were working at plays for Henslowe, singly, or in pairs,
+threes, fours, or fives.&nbsp; We find Drayton, Dekker, Chapman, and
+nine authors now forgotten by all but antiquarians.&nbsp; We have also
+Ben Jonson (1597), Marston, Munday, Middleton, Webster, and others,
+authors in Henslowe&rsquo;s pay.&nbsp; <i>But the same of Shakespeare
+never appears</i>.&nbsp; Mysterious!&nbsp; The other men&rsquo;s names,
+writes Dr. Furness, occur &ldquo;because they were all writers for Henslowe&rsquo;s
+theatre, but we must wait at all events for the discovery of some other
+similar record, before we can produce corresponding memoranda regarding
+Shaksper&rdquo; (<i>sic</i>)<i> </i>&ldquo;and his productions.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation157a"></a><a href="#footnote157a">{157a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The natural mind of the ordinary man explains all by saying, &ldquo;Henslowe
+records no loans of money to Shakspere the actor, because he lent him
+no money.&nbsp; He records no payments for plays to Shakespeare the
+author-actor, because to Henslowe the actor sold no plays.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That is the whole explanation of the Silence of Philip Henslowe.&nbsp;
+If Shakspere did sell a play to Henslowe, why should that financier
+omit the fact from his accounts?&nbsp; Suppose that the actor was illiterate
+as Baconians fervently believe, and sold Bacon&rsquo;s plays, what prevented
+him from selling a play of Bacon&rsquo;s (under his own name, as usual)
+to Henslowe?&nbsp; To obtain a Baconian reply you must wander into conjecture,
+and imagine that Bacon forbade the transaction.&nbsp; Then <i>why </i>did
+he forbid it?&nbsp; Because he could get a better price from Shakspere&rsquo;s
+company?&nbsp; The same cause would produce the same effect on Shakspere
+himself; whether he were the author, or were Bacon&rsquo;s, or any man&rsquo;s
+go-between.&nbsp; On any score but that of money, why was Henslowe good
+enough for Ben Jonson, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and Webster, and
+not good enough for Bacon, who did not appear in the matter at all,
+but was represented in it by the actor, Will?&nbsp; As a gentleman and
+a man of the Court, Bacon would be as much discredited if he were known
+to sell (for &pound;6 on an average) his noble works to the Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s
+Company, as if he sold them to Henslowe.<br>
+<br>
+I know not whether the great lawyer, courtier, scholar, and philosopher
+is supposed by Baconians to have given Will Shakspere a commission on
+his sales of plays; or to have let him keep the whole sum in each case.&nbsp;
+I know not whether the players paid Shakspere a sum down for his (or
+Bacon&rsquo;s) plays, or whether Will received a double share, or other,
+or any share of the profits on them, as Henslowe did when he let a house
+to the players.&nbsp; Nobody knows any of these things.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If Shakspere the player had been a dramatist, surely Henslowe
+would have employed him also, like the others, in that behalf.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation159a"></a><a href="#footnote159a">{159a}</a>&nbsp;
+Henslowe would, if he could have got the &ldquo;copy&rdquo; cheap enough.&nbsp;
+Was any one of &ldquo;the others,&rdquo; the playwrights, a player,
+holding a share in his company?&nbsp; If not, the fact makes an essential
+difference, for Shakspere <i>was </i>a shareholder.&nbsp; Collier, in
+his preface to Henslowe&rsquo;s so-called &ldquo;Diary,&rdquo; mentions
+a playwright who was bound to scribble for Henslowe only (Henry Porter),
+and another, Chettle, who was bound to write only for the company protected
+by the Earl of Nottingham. <a name="citation159b"></a><a href="#footnote159b">{159b}</a>&nbsp;
+Modern publishers and managers sometimes make the same terms with novelists
+and playwrights.<br>
+<br>
+It appears to me that Shakspere&rsquo;s company would be likely, as
+his plays were very popular, to make the same sort of agreement with
+him, and to give him such terms as he would be glad to accept, - whether
+the wares were his own - or Bacon&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He was a keen man of
+business.&nbsp; In such a case, he would not write for Henslowe&rsquo;s
+pittance.&nbsp; He had a better market.&nbsp; The plays, whether written
+by himself, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, were at his disposal,
+and he did not dispose of them to Henslowe, wherefore Henslowe cannot
+mention him in his accounts.&nbsp; That is all.<br>
+<br>
+Quoting an American Judge (Dr. Stotsenburg, apparently), Mr. Greenwood
+cites the circumstance that, in two volumes of Alleyn&rsquo;s papers
+&ldquo;there is not one mention of such a poet as William Shaksper in
+his list of actors, poets, and theatrical comrades.&rdquo; <a name="citation160a"></a><a href="#footnote160a">{160a}</a>&nbsp;
+If this means that Shakspere is not mentioned by Alleyn among actors,
+are we to infer that William was not an actor?&nbsp; Even Baconians
+insist that he was an actor.&nbsp; &ldquo;How strange, how more than
+strange,&rdquo; cries Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;that Henslowe should make
+no mention in all this long diary, embracing all the time from 1591
+to 1609, of the actor-author . . . No matter.&nbsp; <i>Credo quia impossibile</i>!&rdquo;
+<a name="citation160b"></a><a href="#footnote160b">{160b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Credo </i>what? and what is <i>impossible</i>?<i>&nbsp; </i>Henslowe&rsquo;s
+volume is no Diary; he does not tell a single anecdote of any description;
+he merely enters loans, gains, payments.&nbsp; Does Henslowe mention,
+say, Ben Jonson, <i>when he is not doing business with Ben</i>?&nbsp;
+Does he mention any actor or author except in connection with money
+matters?&nbsp; Then, if he did no business with Shakspere the actor,
+in borrowing or lending, and did no business with Shakespeare the author,
+in borrowing, lending, buying or selling, &ldquo;How strange, how more
+than strange&rdquo; it would be if Henslowe <i>did </i>mention Shakespeare!&nbsp;
+He was not keeping a journal of literary and dramatic jottings.&nbsp;
+He was keeping an account of his expenses and receipts.&nbsp; He never
+names Richard Burbage any more than he mentions Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood again expresses his views about this dark suspicious mystery,
+the absence of Shakespeare or Shakspere (or Shak, as you like it), from
+Henslowe&rsquo;s accounts, if Shak(&amp;c.) wrote plays.&nbsp; But the
+mystery, if mystery there be, is just as obscure if the actor were the
+channel through which Bacon&rsquo;s plays reached the stage, for the
+pretended author of these masterpieces.&nbsp; Shak - was not the man
+to do all the troking, bargaining, lying, going here and there, and
+making himself a motley to the view for &pound;0, 0s, 0<i>d</i>.&nbsp;
+If he were a sham, a figure-head, a liar, a fetcher-and-carrier of manuscripts,
+<i>he would be paid for it</i>.&nbsp; But he did not deal with Henslowe
+in his bargainings, and <i>that </i>is why Henslowe does not mention
+him.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood, in one place, <a name="citation161a"></a><a href="#footnote161a">{161a}</a>
+agrees, so far, with me.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why did Henslowe not mention Shakespeare
+as the writer of other plays&rdquo; (than <i>Titus Andronicus </i>and
+<i>Henry VI</i>)?&nbsp; &ldquo;I think the answer is simple enough.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+(So do I.)&nbsp; &ldquo;Neither Shakspere nor &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;
+ever wrote for Henslowe!&rdquo;&nbsp; The obvious is perceived at last;
+and the reason given is &ldquo;that he was above Henslowe&rsquo;s &lsquo;skyline,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+&ldquo;he&rdquo; being the Author.&nbsp; We only differ as to <i>why
+</i>the author was above Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;sky-line.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I say, because good Will had a better market, that of his Company.&nbsp;
+I understand Mr. Greenwood to think, - because the Great Unknown was
+too great a man to deal with Henslowe.&nbsp; If to write for the stage
+were discreditable, to deal (unknown) with Henslowe was no more disgraceful
+than to deal with &ldquo;a cry of players&rdquo;; and as (unknown) Will
+did the bargaining, the Great Unknown was as safe with Will in one case
+as in the other.&nbsp; If Will did not receive anything for the plays
+from his own company (who firmly believed in his authorship), they must
+have said, &ldquo;Will! dost thou serve the Muses and thy obliged fellows
+for naught?&nbsp; Dost thou give us two popular plays yearly, - gratis?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Do you not see that, in the interests of the Great Secret itself, Will
+<i>had </i>to take the pay for the plays (pretended his) from somebody.&nbsp;
+Will Shakspere making his dear fellows and friends a present of two
+masterpieces yearly was too incredible.&nbsp; So I suppose he did have
+royalties on the receipts, or otherwise got his money; and, as he certainly
+did not get them from Henslowe, Henslowe had no conceivable reason for
+entering Will&rsquo;s name in his accounts.<br>
+<br>
+Such are the reflections of a plain man, but to an imaginative soul
+there seems to be a brooding mist, with a heart of fire, which half
+conceals and half reveals the darkened chamber wherein abides &ldquo;The
+Silence of Philip Henslowe.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;The Silence of Philip
+Henslowe,&rdquo; Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;is a very remarkable phenomenon
+. . . &rdquo;&nbsp; It is a phenomenon precisely as remarkable as the
+absence of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s name from the accounts of a boot-maker
+with whom he has never had any dealings.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;If, however, there was a man in high position, &lsquo;a concealed
+poet,&rsquo;&rdquo; who &ldquo;took the works of others and rewrote
+and transformed them, besides bringing out original plays of his own
+. . . then it is natural enough that his name should not appear among
+those [of the] for the most part impecunious dramatists to whom Henslowe
+paid money for playwriting.&rdquo; <a name="citation163a"></a><a href="#footnote163a">{163a}</a>&nbsp;
+Nothing can be more natural, and, in fact, the name of Bacon, or Southampton,
+or James VI, or Sir John Ramsay, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or Sir Fulke
+Greville, or any other &ldquo;man in high position,&rdquo; does <i>not
+</i>appear in Henslowe&rsquo;s accounts.&nbsp; Nor does the name of
+William Shak(&amp;c.).&nbsp; But why should it not appear if Will sold
+either his own plays, or those of the noble friend to whom he lent his
+name and personality - to Henslowe?&nbsp; Why not?<br>
+<br>
+Then consider the figure, to my mind impossible, of the great &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo; &ldquo;of high position,&rdquo; who can &ldquo;bring out
+original plays of his own,&rdquo; and yet &ldquo;takes the works of
+others,&rdquo; say of &ldquo;sporting Kyd,&rdquo; or of Dekker and Chettle,
+and such poor devils, <i>- takes </i>them as a Yankee pirate-publisher
+takes my rhymes, - and &ldquo;rewrites and transforms them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Bacon (or Bungay) <i>cannot </i>&ldquo;take&rdquo; them without permission
+of their legal owners, - Shakspere&rsquo;s or any other company; - of
+any one, in short, who, as Ben Jonson says, &ldquo;buys up reversions
+of old plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; How is he to manage these shabby dealings?&nbsp;
+Apparently he employs Will Shakspere, spells his own &ldquo;<i>nom de
+plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>&ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; and has his rewritings
+and transformations of the destitute author&rsquo;s work acted by Will&rsquo;s
+company.&nbsp; What a situation for Bacon, or Sir Fulke Greville, or
+James VI, or any &ldquo;man in high position&rdquo; whom fancy can suggest!&nbsp;
+The plays by the original authors, whoever they were, could only be
+obtained by the &ldquo;concealed poet&rdquo; and &ldquo;man in high
+position&rdquo; from the legal owners, Shakspere&rsquo;s company, usually.&nbsp;
+The concealed poet had to negotiate with the owners, and Bacon (or whoever
+he was) employed that scamp Will Shakspere, first, I think, to extract
+the plays from the owners, and then to pretend that he himself, even
+Will, had &ldquo;rewritten and transformed them.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+What an associate was our Will for the concealed poet; how certain it
+was that Will would blackmail the &ldquo;man in high position&rdquo;!&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Doubtless&rdquo; he did: we find Bacon arrested for debt, more
+than once, while Will buys New Place, in Stratford, with the money extorted
+from the concealed poet of high position. <a name="citation164a"></a><a href="#footnote164a">{164a}</a>&nbsp;
+Bacon did associate with that serpent Phillips, a reptile of Walsingham,
+who forged a postscript to Mary Stuart&rsquo;s letter to Babington.&nbsp;
+But now, if not Bacon, then some other concealed poet of high position,
+with a mysterious passion for rewriting and transforming plays by sad,
+needy authors, is in close contact with Will Shakspere, the Warwickshire
+poacher and ignorant butcher&rsquo;s boy, country schoolmaster, draper&rsquo;s
+apprentice, <i>enfin</i>,<i> tout le tremblement.<br>
+<br>
+</i>&ldquo;How strange, how more than strange!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The sum of the matter seems to me to be that from as early as March
+3, 1591, we find Henslowe receiving small sums of money for the performances
+of many plays.&nbsp; He was paid as owner or lessee of the House used
+by this or that company.&nbsp; On March 3, 1591, the play acted by &ldquo;Lord
+Strange&rsquo;s (Derby&rsquo;s) men&rdquo; was <i>Henry VI</i>.&nbsp;
+Several other plays with names familiar in Shakespeare&rsquo;s Works,
+such as <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> </i>all the three parts of <i>Henry
+VI</i>,<i> King Leare </i>(April 6, 1593), <i>Henry V </i>(May 14, 1592),
+<i>The Taming of a Shrew </i>(June 11, 1594), and <i>Hamlet</i>,<i>
+</i>paid toll to Henslowe.&nbsp; He &ldquo;received&rdquo; so much,
+on each occasion, when they were acted in a theatre of his.&nbsp; But
+he never records his purchase of these plays; and it is not generally
+believed that Shakespeare was the author of all these plays, in the
+form which they bore in 1591-4: though there is much difference of opinion.<br>
+<br>
+There is one rather interesting case.&nbsp; On August 25, 1594, Henslowe
+enters &ldquo;<i>ne</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(that is, &ldquo;a new play&rdquo;)
+&ldquo;Received at the Venesyon Comodey, eighteen pence.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+That was his share of the receipts.&nbsp; The Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s
+Company, that of Shakespeare, was playing in Henslowe&rsquo;s theatre
+at Newington Butts.&nbsp; If the &ldquo;Venesyon Comodey&rdquo; (Venetian
+Comedy) were <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>,<i> </i>this is the first
+mention of it.&nbsp; But nobody knows what Henslowe meant by &ldquo;the
+Venesyon Comodey.&rdquo;&nbsp; He does not mention the author&rsquo;s
+name, because, in this part of his accounts he never does mention the
+author or authors.&nbsp; He only names them when he buys from, or lends
+to, or has other money dealings with the authors.&nbsp; He had none
+with Shakespeare, hence the Silence of Philip Henslowe.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IX: THE LATER LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE - HIS MONUMENT AND PORTRAITS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In the chapter on the Preoccupations of Bacon the reader may find help
+in making up his mind as to whether Bacon, with his many and onerous
+duties and occupations, his scientific studies, and his absorbing scientific
+preoccupation, is a probable author of the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood finds the young Shakspere impossible - because of his
+ignorance - which made him such a really good pseudo-author, and such
+a successful mask for Bacon, or Bacon&rsquo;s unknown equivalent.&nbsp;
+The Shakspere of later life, the well-to-do Shakspere, the purchaser
+of the right to bear arms; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager
+a creditor; a would-be encloser of a common; a man totally bookless,
+is, to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s mind, an impossible author of the later
+plays.<br>
+<br>
+Here, first, are moral objections on the ground of character as revealed
+in some legal documents concerning business.&nbsp; Now, I am very ready
+to confess that William&rsquo;s dealings with his debtors, and with
+one creditor, are wholly unlike what I should expect from the author
+of the plays.&nbsp; Moreover, the conduct of Shelley in regard to his
+wife was, in my opinion, very mean and cruel, and the last thing that
+we could have expected from one who, in verse, was such a tender philanthropist,
+and in life was - women apart - the best-hearted of men.&nbsp; The conduct
+of Robert Burns, alas, too often disappoints the lover of his <i>Cottar</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Saturday Night </i>and other moral pieces.&nbsp; He was an inconsistent
+walker.<br>
+<br>
+I sincerely wish that Shakespeare had been less hard in money matters,
+just as I wish that in financial matters Scott had been more like himself,
+that he had not done the last things that we should have expected him
+to do.&nbsp; As a member of the Scottish Bar it was inconsistent with
+his honour to be the secret proprietor of a publishing and a printing
+business.&nbsp; This is the unexplained moral paradox in the career
+of a man of chivalrous honour and strict probity: but the fault did
+not prevent Scott from writing his novels and poems.&nbsp; Why, then,
+should the few bare records of Shakspere&rsquo;s monetary transactions
+make <i>his </i>authorship impossible?&nbsp; The objection seems weakly
+sentimental.<br>
+<br>
+Macaulay scolds Scott as fiercely as Mr. Greenwood scolds Shakspere,
+- for the more part, ignorantly and unjustly.&nbsp; Still, there is
+matter to cause surprise and regret.&nbsp; Both Scott and Shakspere
+are accused of writing for gain, and of spending money on lands and
+houses with the desire to found families.&nbsp; But in the mysterious
+mixture of each human personality, any sober soul who reflects on his
+own sins and failings will not think other men&rsquo;s failings incompatible
+with intellectual excellence.&nbsp; Bacon&rsquo;s own conduct in money
+matters was that of a man equally grasping and extravagant.&nbsp; Ben
+Jonson thus describes Shakespeare as a social character: &ldquo;He was
+indeed honest, and of an open and free nature . . . I loved the man
+and do honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Perhaps Ben never owed money to Shakspere and refused to pay!<br>
+<br>
+We must not judge a man&rsquo;s whole intellectual character, and declare
+him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about
+matters of business.&nbsp; Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan
+Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which
+the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering, - pursued by the distraint
+of one of the friendly family of Quiney - Adrian Quiney.&nbsp; They
+were neighbours and made a common dunghill in Henley Street. <a name="citation171a"></a><a href="#footnote171a">{171a}</a>&nbsp;
+I do not, like Mr. Greenwood, see anything &ldquo;at all out of the
+way&rdquo; in the circumstance &ldquo;that a man should be writing <i>Hamlet</i>,<i>
+</i>and at the same time bringing actions for petty sums lent on loan
+at some unspecified interest.&rdquo; <a name="citation171b"></a><a href="#footnote171b">{171b}</a>&nbsp;
+Nor do I see anything at all out of the way in Bacon&rsquo;s prosecution
+of his friend and benefactor, Essex (1601), while Bacon was writing
+<i>Hamlet</i>.&nbsp; Indeed, Shakspere&rsquo;s case is the less &ldquo;out
+of the way&rdquo; of the two.&nbsp; He wanted his loan to be repaid,
+and told his lawyer to bring an action.&nbsp; Bacon wanted to keep his
+head (of inestimable value) on his shoulders; or to keep his body out
+of the Tower; or he merely, as he declares, wanted to do his duty as
+a lawyer of the Crown.&nbsp; In any case, Bacon was in a tragic position
+almost unexampled; and was at once overwhelmed by work, and, one must
+suppose, by acute distress of mind, in the case of Essex.&nbsp; He must
+have felt this the more keenly, if, as some Baconians vow, <i>he wrote
+the Sonnets to Essex</i>.&nbsp; Whether he were writing his <i>Hamlet
+</i>when engaged in Essex&rsquo;s case (1601), or any other of his dramatic
+masterpieces, even this astonishing man must have been sorely bestead
+to combine so many branches of business.<br>
+<br>
+Thus I would reply to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s amazement that Shakspere,
+a hard creditor, and so forth, should none the less have been able to
+write his plays.&nbsp; But if it is meant that a few business transactions
+must have absorbed the whole consciousness of Shakespeare, and left
+him neither time nor inclination for poetry, consider the scientific
+preoccupation of Bacon, his parliamentary duties, his ceaseless activity
+as &ldquo;one of the legal body-guard of the Queen&rdquo; at a time
+when he had often to be examining persons accused of conspiracy, - and
+do not forget his long and poignant anxiety about Essex, his constant
+efforts to reconcile him with Elizabeth, and to advocate his cause without
+losing her favour; and, finally, the anguish of prosecuting his friend,
+and of knowing how hardly the world judged his own conduct.&nbsp; Follow
+him into his relations with James I; his eager pursuit of favour, the
+multiplicity of his affairs, his pecuniary distresses, and the profound
+study and severe labour entailed by the preparation for and the composition
+of <i>The Advancement of Learning </i>(1603-5).&nbsp; He must be a stout-hearted
+Baconian who can believe that, between 1599 and 1605, Bacon was writing
+<i>Hamlet</i>,<i> </i>and other masterpieces of tragedy or comedy.&nbsp;
+But all is possible to genius.&nbsp; What Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Great
+Unknown was doing at this period, &ldquo;neither does he know, nor do
+I know, but he only.&rdquo;&nbsp; He, no doubt, had abundance of leisure.<br>
+<br>
+At last Shakspere died (1616), and had not the mead of one melodious
+tear, as far as we know, from the London wits, in the shape of obituary
+verses.&nbsp; This fills Mr. Greenwood with amazement.&nbsp; &ldquo;Was
+it because &lsquo;the friends of the Muses&rsquo; were for the most
+part aware that Shakespeare had not died with Shakspere?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Did Jonson perchance think that his idea might be realised when he wrote,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;What a sight it were,<br>
+To see thee in our waters yet appear&rdquo;?<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+and so on.&nbsp; Did Jonson expect and hope to see the genuine &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+return to the stage, seven years after the death of Shakspere the actor,
+the Swan of Avon?&nbsp; As Jonson was fairly sane, we can no more suspect
+him of having hoped for this miracle than believe that most of the poets
+knew the actor not to be the author.&nbsp; Moreover Jonson, while desiring
+that Shakespeare might &ldquo;shine forth&rdquo; again and cheer the
+drooping stage, added,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like Night,<br>
+And despairs day, but for thy volume&rsquo;s light,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+that is - the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; Ben did not weave the amazing tissue
+of involved and contradictory falsities attributed to him by Baconians.&nbsp;
+Beaumont died in the same year as Shakspere, who died in the depths
+of the country, weary of London.&nbsp; Has Mr. Greenwood found obituary
+poems dropped on the grave of the famous Beaumont?&nbsp; Did Fletcher,
+did Jonson, produce one melodious tear for the loss of their friend;
+in Fletcher&rsquo;s case his constant partner?&nbsp; No?&nbsp; Were
+the poets, then, aware that Beaumont was a humbug, whose poems and plays
+were written by Bacon? <a name="citation174a"></a><a href="#footnote174a">{174a}</a><br>
+<br>
+I am not to discuss Shakespeare&rsquo;s Will, the &ldquo;second-best
+bed,&rdquo; and so forth.&nbsp; But as Shakespeare&rsquo;s Will says
+not a word about his books, it is decided by Mr. Greenwood that he had
+no books.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood is a lawyer; so was my late friend Mr.
+Charles Elton, Q.C., of White Staunton, who remarks that Shakespeare
+bequeathed &ldquo;all the rest of my goods, chattels, leases, &amp;c.,
+to my son-in-law, John Hall, gent.&rdquo;&nbsp; (He really <i>was </i>a
+&ldquo;gent.&rdquo; with authentic coat-armour.)<br>
+<br>
+It is with Mr. Elton&rsquo;s opinion, not with my ignorance, that Mr.
+Greenwood must argue in proof of the view that &ldquo;goods&rdquo; are
+necessarily exclusive of books, for Mr. Elton takes it as a quite natural
+fact that Shakespeare&rsquo;s books passed, with his other goods, to
+Mr. Hall, and thence to a Mr. Nash, to whom Mr. Hall left &ldquo;my
+study of books&rdquo; <a name="citation175a"></a><a href="#footnote175a">{175a}</a>
+(library).&nbsp; I only give this as a lawyer&rsquo;s opinion.<br>
+<br>
+There is in the Bodleian an Aldine Ovid, &ldquo;with Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo;
+signature (merely Wm. She.), and a note, &ldquo;This little volume of
+Ovid was given to me by W. Hall, who sayd it was once Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I do not know that the signature (like that on Florio&rsquo;s <i>Montaigne</i>,<i>
+</i>in the British Museum) has been detected as a forgery; nor do I
+know that Shakespeare&rsquo;s not specially mentioning his books proves
+that he had none.&nbsp; Lawyers appear to differ as to this inference:
+both Mr. Elton and Mr. Greenwood seem equally confident. <a name="citation175b"></a><a href="#footnote175b">{175b}</a>&nbsp;
+But if it were perfectly natural that the actor, Shakspere, should have
+no books, then he certainly made no effort, by the local colour of owning
+a few volumes, to persuade mankind that he <i>was </i>the author.&nbsp;
+Yet they believed that he was - really there is no wriggling out of
+it.&nbsp; As regards any of his own MSS. which Shakespeare may have
+had (one would expect them to be at his theatre), and their monetary
+value, if they were not, as usual, the property of his company, and
+of him as a member thereof, we can discuss that question in the section
+headed &ldquo;The First Folio.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It appears that Shakespeare&rsquo;s daughter, Judith, could write no
+more than her grandfather. <a name="citation176a"></a><a href="#footnote176a">{176a}</a>&nbsp;
+Nor, I repeat, could the Lady Jane Gordon, daughter of the great Earl
+of Huntly, when she was married to the Earl of Bothwell in 1566.&nbsp;
+At all events, Lady Jane &ldquo;made her mark.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may be
+feared that Judith, brought up in that very illiterate town of Stratford,
+under an illiterate mother, was neglected in her education.&nbsp; Sad,
+but very common in women of her rank, and scarcely a proof that her
+father did not write the plays.<br>
+<br>
+As &ldquo;nothing is known of the disposition and character&rdquo; <a name="citation176b"></a><a href="#footnote176b">{176b}</a>
+of Shakespeare&rsquo;s grand-daughter, Lady Barnard, who died in 1670,
+it is not so paralysingly strange that nothing is known of any relics
+or anecdotes of Shakespeare which she may have possessed.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood &ldquo;would have supposed that she would have had much to
+say about the great poet,&rdquo; exhibited his books (if any), and so
+forth.&nbsp; Perhaps she did, - but how, if we &ldquo;know nothing about
+her disposition and character,&rdquo; can we tell?&nbsp; No interviewers
+rushed to her house (Abington Hall, Northampton-shire) with pencils
+and notebooks to record her utterances; no reporter interviewed her
+for the press.&nbsp; It is surprising, is it not?<br>
+<br>
+The inference might be drawn, in the Baconian manner, that, during the
+Commonwealth and Restoration, &ldquo;the friends of the Muses&rdquo;
+knew that the actor was <i>not </i>the author, and therefore did not
+interview his granddaughter in the country.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But, at any rate, we have the Stratford monument,&rdquo; says
+Mr. Greenwood, and delves into this problem.&nbsp; Even the Stratford
+monument of Shakespeare in the parish church is haunted by Baconian
+mysteries.&nbsp; If the gentle reader will throw his eye over the photograph
+<a name="citation177a"></a><a href="#footnote177a">{177a}</a> of the
+monument as it now exists, he may not be able to say to the face of
+the poet -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thou wast that all to me, Will,<br>
+For which my soul did pine.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+But if he has any knowledge of Jacobean busts on monuments, he will
+probably agree with me in saying, &ldquo;This effigy, though executed
+by somebody who was not a Pheidias, and who perhaps worked merely from
+descriptions, is, at all events, Jacobean.&rdquo;&nbsp; The same may
+assuredly be said of the monument; it is in good Jacobean style: the
+pillars with their capitals are graceful: all the rest is in keeping;
+and the two inscriptions are in the square capital letters of inscriptions
+of the period; not in italic characters.&nbsp; Distrusting my own <i>expertise</i>,<i>
+</i>I have consulted Sir Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Holmes of the National
+Portrait Gallery.&nbsp; They, with Mr. Spielmann, think the work to
+be of the early seventeenth century.<br>
+<br>
+Next, glance at the figure opposite.&nbsp; This is a reproduction of
+&ldquo;the earliest representation of the Bust&rdquo; (and monument)
+in Dugdale&rsquo;s <i>Antiquities of Warwickshire </i>(1656).&nbsp;
+Compare the two objects, point by point, from the potato on top with
+holes in it, of Dugdale, which is meant for a skull, through all the
+details, - bust and all.&nbsp; Does Dugdale&rsquo;s print, whether engraved
+by Hollar or not, represent a Jacobean work?&nbsp; Look at the two ludicrous
+children, their legs dangling in air; at the lions&rsquo; heads above
+the capitals of the pillars; at the lettering of the two visible words
+of the inscription, and at the gloomy hypochondriac or lunatic, clasping
+a cushion to his abdomen.&nbsp; That hideous design was not executed
+by an artist who &ldquo;had his eye on the object,&rdquo; if the object
+were a Jacobean monument: while the actual monument was fashioned in
+no period of art but the Jacobean.&nbsp; From Digges&rsquo; rhymes in
+the Folio of 1623, we know that Shakespeare already had his &ldquo;Stratford
+monument.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>The existing object is what he had; </i>the
+monument in Dugdale is what, I hope, no architect of 1616-23 could have
+imagined or designed.<br>
+<br>
+Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving is not a correct copy of any genuine Jacobean
+work of art.&nbsp; Is Dugdale accurate in his reproductions of other
+monuments in Stratford Church?&nbsp; To satisfy himself on this point,
+Sir George Trevelyan, as he wrote to me (June 13, 1912),<i> </i>&ldquo;made
+a sketch of the Carew Renaissance monument in Stratford Church, and
+found that the discrepancies between the original tomb and the representation
+in Dugdale&rsquo;s <i>Warwickshire </i>are far and away greater than
+in the monument to William Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation179a"></a><a href="#footnote179a">{179a}</a>
+while justly observing that &ldquo;the little sitting figures . . .
+are placed as no monumental sculptor would place them,&rdquo; &ldquo;on
+the whole sees no reason at all why we should doubt the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale&rsquo;s figure . . .&nbsp; It is impossible to suppose
+that Hollar would have drawn and that Dugdale would have published a
+mere travesty of the Stratford Monument.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I do not know who drew the design, but a travesty of Jacobean work it
+is in every detail of the monument.&nbsp; A travesty is what Dugdale
+gives as a representation of the Carew monument.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood,
+elsewhere, repeating his criticism of the impossible figures of children,
+says: &ldquo;This is certainly mere matter of detail, and, in the absence
+of other evidence, would give us no warrant for doubting the substantial
+accuracy of Dugdale&rsquo;s presentment of the &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;
+bust.&rdquo; <a name="citation180a"></a><a href="#footnote180a">{180a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Why are we to believe that Dugdale&rsquo;s artist was merely fantastic
+in his design of the children (and also remote from Jacobean taste in
+every detail), and yet to credit him with &ldquo;substantial accuracy&rdquo;
+in his half-length of a gloomy creature clutching a cushion to his stomach?&nbsp;
+With his inaccuracies as to the Carew monument, why are we to accept
+him as accurate in his representation of the bust?&nbsp; Moreover, other
+evidence is not wanting.&nbsp; It is positively certain that the monument
+existing in 1748, was then known as &ldquo;the original monument,&rdquo;
+and that no other monument was put in its place, at that date or later.<br>
+<br>
+Now Mrs. Stopes <a name="citation180b"></a><a href="#footnote180b">{180b}</a>
+argues that in 1748 the monument was &ldquo;entirely reconstructed,&rdquo;
+and so must have become no longer what Dugdale&rsquo;s man drew, but
+what we see to-day.&nbsp; It is positively certain that her opinion
+is erroneous.<br>
+<br>
+If ever what we see to-day was substituted for anything like what Dugdale&rsquo;s
+man drew, the date of the substitution is unknown.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Stopes herself discovered the documents which disprove her theory.&nbsp;
+They were known to Halliwell-Phillipps, who quotes an unnamed &ldquo;contemporary
+account.&rdquo; <a name="citation181a"></a><a href="#footnote181a">{181a}</a>&nbsp;
+This account Mrs. Stopes, with her tireless industry, found in the Wheler
+manuscripts, among papers of the Rev. Joseph Greene, in 1746 Head Master
+of the Grammar School.&nbsp; In one paper of September 1740 &ldquo;the
+original monument&rdquo; is said to be &ldquo;much impaired and decayed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There was a scheme for making &ldquo;a new monument&rdquo; in Westminster
+Abbey.&nbsp; <i>That</i>,<i> </i>I venture to think, would have been
+in Hanoverian, not in Jacobean taste and style.&nbsp; But there was
+no money for a new monument.&nbsp; Mrs. Stopes also found a paper of
+November 20, 1748, showing that in September 1746, Mr. Ward (grandfather
+of Mrs. Siddons) was at Stratford with &ldquo;a cry of players.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+He devoted the proceeds of a performance of <i>Othello </i>to the reparation
+of the then existing monument.&nbsp; The amount was twelve pounds ten
+shillings.&nbsp; The affair dragged on, one of the Church-wardens, a
+blacksmith, held the &pound;12, 10<i>s</i>., and was troublesome.&nbsp;
+The document of November 20, 1748, was drawn up to be signed, but was
+not signed, by the persons who appear to be chiefly concerned in the
+matter.&nbsp; It directed that Mr. Hall, a local limner or painter,
+is to &ldquo;take care, according to his ability, that the monument
+shall become as like as possible to what it was when first erected.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This appears to have been the idea of Mr. Greene.&nbsp; Another form
+of words was later adopted, directing Mr. Hall, the painter, &ldquo;to
+repair and beautify, or to have the direction of repairing and beautifying,
+<i>the original monument </i>of Shakespeare the poet.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mrs.
+Stopes infers, justly in my opinion, that Hall &ldquo;would fill up
+the gaps, restore what was amissing as he thought it ought to be, and
+finally repaint it according to the original colours, traces of which
+he might still be able to see.&rdquo;&nbsp; In his <i>History and Antiquities
+of Stratford-on-Avon</i>, <a name="citation182a"></a><a href="#footnote182a">{182a}</a><i>
+</i>Mr. Wheler tells us that this was what Hall did.&nbsp; &ldquo;In
+the year 1748 the monument was carefully repaired, and the original
+colours of the bust, &amp;c., as much as possible preserved by Mr. John
+Hall, limner, of Stratford.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting
+is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 &ldquo;painted in
+white,&rdquo; to please Malone.&nbsp; It was repainted in 1861.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do,
+and what, according to Wheler, he did.&nbsp; She writes: &ldquo;It would
+only be giving good value for his money&rdquo; (&pound;12, 10<i>s</i>.)
+&ldquo;to his churchwardens if Hall added (<i>sic</i>)<i> </i>a cloak,
+a pen, and manuscript.&rdquo;&nbsp; He &ldquo;could not help changing&rdquo;
+the face, and so on.<br>
+<br>
+Now it was physically impossible to <i>add </i>a cloak, a pen, and manuscript
+to such a stone bust as Dugdale&rsquo;s man shows; to take away the
+cushion pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head.&nbsp; Mr. Hall,
+if he was to give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust,
+and, to give us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale&rsquo;s
+print, had to construct an entirely new monument.&nbsp; Now Hall was
+a painter, not (like Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor.&nbsp;
+<i>Pour tout potage </i>he had but &pound;12, 10<i>s</i>.&nbsp; He could
+not do, and he did not do these things! he did not destroy &ldquo;the
+original monument&rdquo; and make a new monument in Jacobean style.&nbsp;
+He was straitly ordered to &ldquo;repair and beautify the original monument&rdquo;;
+he did repair it, and repainted the colours.&nbsp; That is all.&nbsp;
+I do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us <a name="citation183a"></a><a href="#footnote183a">{183a}</a>
+about the repairing of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and
+the pen; work which, he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of
+Oxford in 1790.&nbsp; He gives no authority, and Baconians may say that
+he was hoaxed, or &ldquo;lied with circumstance.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation183b"></a><a href="#footnote183b">{183b}</a>
+quotes Halliwell-Phillipps&rsquo;s <i>Works of Shakespeare </i>(1853),<i>
+</i>in which he says that the design in Dugdale&rsquo;s book &ldquo;is
+evidently too inaccurate to be of any authority; the probability being
+that it was not taken from the monument itself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Indeed
+the designer is so inaccurate that he gives the first word of the Latin
+inscription as &ldquo;Judicyo,&rdquo; just as Oudry blunders in the
+Latin inscription of a portrait of Mary Stuart which he copied badly.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood proceeds: &ldquo;In his <i>Outlines </i>Halliwell simply
+ignores Dugdale.&nbsp; His engraving was doubtless too inconvenient
+to be brought to public notice!&rdquo;&nbsp; Here Halliwell is accused
+of suppressing the truth; if he invented his minute details about the
+repeated reparation of the writing hand, - not represented in Dugdale&rsquo;s
+design, - he also lied with circumstance.&nbsp; But he certainly quoted
+a genuine &ldquo;contemporary account&rdquo; of the orders for repairing
+and beautifying the original monument in 1748, and I presume that he
+also had records for what he says about reparations of the hand and
+pen.&nbsp; He speaks, too, of substitutions for decayed alabaster parts
+of the monument, though not in his <i>Outlines; </i>and I observe that,
+in Mrs. Stopes&rsquo;s papers, there is record of a meeting on December
+20, 1748, at which mention was made of &ldquo;the materials&rdquo; which
+Hall was to use for repairs.<br>
+<br>
+To me the evidence of the style as to the date of both monument and
+bust speaks so loudly for their accepted date (1616-23) and against
+the Georgian date of 1748, that I need no other evidence; nor do I suppose
+that any one familiar with the monumental style of 1590-1620 can be
+of a different opinion.&nbsp; In the same way I do not expect any artist
+or engraver to take the engraving of the monument in Rowe&rsquo;s <i>Shakespeare
+</i>(1709), and that by Grignion so late as 1786, for anything but copies
+of the design in Dugdale, with modifications made <i>&agrave; plaisir</i>.&nbsp;
+In Pope&rsquo;s edition (1725) Vertue gives the monument with some approach
+to accuracy, but for the bald plump face of the bust presents a top-heavy
+and sculpturally impossible face borrowed from &ldquo;the Chandos portrait,&rdquo;
+which, in my opinion, is of no more authority than any other portrait
+of Shakespeare.&nbsp; None of them, I conceive, was painted from the
+life.<br>
+<br>
+The Baconians show a wistful longing to suppose the original bust, copied
+in Dugdale, to have been meant for Bacon; but we need not waste words
+over this speculation.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood writes that &ldquo;if I should
+be told that Dugdale&rsquo;s effigy represented an elderly farmer deploring
+an exceptionally bad harvest, &lsquo;I should not feel it to be strange!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Neither should I feel it at all strange if I were told that it was the
+presentment of a philosopher and Lord Chancellor, who had fallen from
+high estate and recognised that all things are but vanity.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>I </i>should not feel it to be strange&rdquo; if a Baconian
+told me that the effigy of a living ex-Chancellor were placed in the
+monument of the dead Will Shakspere, and if, on asking why the alteration
+was made, I were asked in reply, in Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s words, &ldquo;Was
+Dugdale&rsquo;s bust thought to bear too much resemblance to one who
+was not Shakspere of Stratford?&nbsp; Or was it thought that the presence
+of a woolsack&rdquo; (the cushion) &ldquo;might be taken as indicating
+that Shakspere of Stratford was indebted for support to a certain Lord
+Chancellor?&rdquo; <a name="citation186a"></a><a href="#footnote186a">{186a}</a>&nbsp;
+Such, indeed, are the things that Baconians might readily say: do say,
+I believe.<br>
+<br>
+Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving reproduces the first words of a Latin inscription,
+still on the monument:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>Judicio Pylium</i>,<i> genio Socratem</i>,<i> arte Maronem<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Terra tegit</i>,<i> populus m&aelig;ret</i>,<i> Olympus
+habet:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>&ldquo;Earth covers, Olympus&rdquo; (heaven? or the Muses&rsquo;
+Hill?) &ldquo;holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art,
+a Virgil; a Socrates for his D&aelig;mon&rdquo; (&ldquo;Genius&rdquo;).&nbsp;
+As for the &ldquo;Genius,&rdquo; or d&aelig;mon of Socrates, and the
+permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short;
+and the use of <i>Olympus </i>for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient
+to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. <a name="citation186b"></a><a href="#footnote186b">{186b}</a>&nbsp;
+The poet who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no
+cause to object to another on his monument.&nbsp; We do not know who
+erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph;
+but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) &ldquo;a clayver
+man.&rdquo;&nbsp; The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly
+put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall.&nbsp; They exhibit a taste
+for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with
+one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. <a name="citation187a"></a><a href="#footnote187a">{187a}</a>&nbsp;
+It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual
+strain of Christian mysticism.&nbsp; Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged
+for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.<br>
+<br>
+The famous &ldquo;Good friend for Jesus&rsquo; sake forbear,&rdquo;
+and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust
+of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of &ldquo;the last lines written,
+we are told,&rdquo; <a name="citation187b"></a><a href="#footnote187b">{187b}</a>
+&ldquo;by the author of <i>Hamlet</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp; Who tells us that
+Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel?&nbsp; Is it conceivable
+that the authority for Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorship of the doggerel
+is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen&rsquo;s in 1693, from
+a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says, - criticism makes the clerk
+twenty years younger. <a name="citation187c"></a><a href="#footnote187c">{187c}</a>&nbsp;
+For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere
+of Stratford.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will&rsquo;s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her
+epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father&rsquo;s intelligence.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Witty above her sex, but that&rsquo;s not all,<br>
+Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,<br>
+Something of Shakespeare was in <i>that</i>, but <i>this<br>
+</i>Wholly of Him with whom she&rsquo;s now in bliss.&rdquo; <a name="citation187d"></a><a href="#footnote187d">{187d}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Thirty-three years after Shakespeare&rsquo;s death he was still thought
+&ldquo;witty&rdquo; in Stratford.&nbsp; But what could Stratford know?&nbsp;
+Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and
+the rest of the generation after Shakespeare.&nbsp; But they did not
+know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine
+author of the plays and poems.&nbsp; The secret, perhaps, so widely
+spread among &ldquo;the friends of the Muses&rdquo; in 1616, was singularly
+well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule.<br>
+<br>
+I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which
+pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about
+his monument and his grave, and asks if he &ldquo;died with a curse
+upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might <i>move his
+bones</i>?&nbsp; A mean and vulgar curse indeed!&rdquo; <a name="citation188a"></a><a href="#footnote188a">{188a}</a>&nbsp;
+And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and
+vulgar curse upon his lips?<br>
+<br>
+About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost
+after Shakespeare&rsquo;s death, W. Hall, a Queen&rsquo;s man, Oxford
+(the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford,
+and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow
+of Queen&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was
+the author of the mean and vulgar curse.&nbsp; He adds that there was
+a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug
+up were piled, &ldquo;they would load a great number of waggons.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style
+intelligible to clerks and sextons, &ldquo;for the most part a very
+ignorant sort of people.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+If Shakespeare <i>did</i>,<i> </i>that accommodation of himself to his
+audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. <a name="citation189a"></a><a href="#footnote189a">{189a}</a>&nbsp;
+Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse:
+that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.<br>
+<br>
+Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter.&nbsp;
+Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben,
+as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio &ldquo;a good send-off.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait,
+if from any, it was executed.&nbsp; Richard Burbage is known to have
+amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on
+a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor.&nbsp; If so, he may have
+succeeded no better than Mary Stuart&rsquo;s embroiderer, Oudry, in
+his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.<br>
+<br>
+That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while Shakespeare,
+as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the authorship of
+the plays.&nbsp; Ben was a scholar, the darling of both Universities;
+constantly employed about the Court in arranging Masques; his learning
+and his Scottish blood may have led James I to notice him.&nbsp; Ben,
+in his later years, was much in society; fashionable and literary.&nbsp;
+He was the father of the literary &ldquo;tribe of Ben.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Thus he naturally sat for his portrait.&nbsp; In the same way George
+Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox.&nbsp; But as a
+scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor of
+his King, and was the &ldquo;good pen&rdquo; of the anti-Marian nobles,
+Murray, Morton, and the rest.&nbsp; Therefore Buchanan&rsquo;s portrait
+was painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently,
+after his death, from descriptions, for Beza&rsquo;s <i>Icones</i>.&nbsp;
+The Folio engraving may have no better source.&nbsp; Without much minute
+research it is hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and,
+just as in Shakespeare&rsquo;s case, <a name="citation190a"></a><a href="#footnote190a">{190a}</a>
+the market, in her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded
+with &ldquo;mock-originals,&rdquo; not even derived (in any case known
+to me) from genuine and authentic contemporary works.<br>
+<br>
+One thing is certain about the Stratford bust.&nbsp; Baconians will
+believe that Dugdale&rsquo;s man correctly represented the bust as it
+was in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs
+of Dugdale&rsquo;s man&rsquo;s fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the
+evidence of style; and in spite of documentary evidence that &ldquo;the
+original monument&rdquo; was not to be destroyed and replaced by the
+actual monument, but was merely &ldquo;repaired and beautified&rdquo;
+(painted afresh) by a local painter.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER X: &ldquo;THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non-Baconian
+Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to address him
+thus: Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in memory these
+statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly insisted,
+namely, that society in Stratford was not only not literary, but was
+illiterate.&nbsp; Next pardon me for asking you to remember that the
+late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century did not resemble our
+fortunate age.&nbsp; Some people read Shakespeare&rsquo;s, Beaumont&rsquo;s,
+and Fletcher&rsquo;s plays.&nbsp; This exercise is now very rarely practised.&nbsp;
+But nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private lives
+and personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan and Jacobean
+playwrights, in the modern manner.&nbsp; Of Shakespeare (pardon, I mean
+Shakspere), the actor, there is one contemporary anecdote, in my poor
+opinion a baseless waggery.&nbsp; Of Beaumont there is none.&nbsp; Of
+a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears
+at the end of the seventeenth century, - nothing better.&nbsp; Meanwhile
+of Shakspere the &ldquo;traditions&rdquo; must be sought either at Stratford
+or in connection with the London Stage; and in both cases the traditions
+began to be in demand very late.<br>
+<br>
+As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any traditions
+that survived cannot conceivably have been literary.&nbsp; That is absolutely
+certain.&nbsp; Natives at Stratford had, by your own hypothesis, scant
+interest in literary anecdote.&nbsp; Fifty years after Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit (though
+it was remembered in 1649, that he was &ldquo;witty&rdquo;), or any
+&ldquo;wood-notes wild,&rdquo; which he may have displayed or chirped
+at an early age.<br>
+<br>
+Such things were of no interest to Stratford.&nbsp; If he made a speech
+when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the circumstance
+might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even be remembered
+as &ldquo;the best of his family,&rdquo; - the least inefficient.&nbsp;
+Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect
+nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.<br>
+<br>
+Let me illustrate by a modern example.&nbsp; In 1866 I was an undergraduate
+of a year&rsquo;s standing at Balliol College, Oxford, certainly not
+an unlettered academy.&nbsp; In that year, the early and the best poems
+of a considerable Balliol poet were published: he had &ldquo;gone down&rdquo;
+some eight years before.&nbsp; Being young and green I eagerly sought
+for traditions about Mr. Swinburne.&nbsp; One of his contemporaries,
+who took a First in the final Classical Schools, told me that &ldquo;he
+was a smug.&rdquo;&nbsp; Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend
+(later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed that they
+should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club.&nbsp;
+A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician,
+merely smiled at my early enthusiasm, - and told me nothing.&nbsp; A
+white-haired College servant said that &ldquo;Mr. Swinburne was a very
+quiet gentleman.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty
+years after Shakspere&rsquo;s death, - a Civil War and the Reign of
+the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened, - and
+ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere&rsquo;s early
+brilliance, a century before, survived at Stratford.<br>
+<br>
+A very humble parallel may follow.&nbsp; Some foolish person went seeking
+early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick.&nbsp;
+From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and interesting
+about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted,
+shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucestershire
+and Oxford.&nbsp; But about me the inquiring literary snipe only heard
+that &ldquo;Andra was aye the stupid ane o&rsquo; the fam&rsquo;ly.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, <i>non sine gloria</i>!<i>&nbsp;
+</i>Even <i>that </i>was forgotten.<br>
+<br>
+Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow townsman&rsquo;s
+youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from sixty to a
+hundred years after date.&nbsp; It is not in human nature that what
+was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the grandson.&nbsp;
+Go to &ldquo;Thrums&rdquo; and ask for literary memories of the youth
+of Mr. Barrie.<br>
+<br>
+Yet <a name="citation198a"></a><a href="#footnote198a">{198a}</a> the
+learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of Shakespeare but
+the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink
+taken (<i>where</i>,<i> </i>I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered,
+so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant places.&nbsp;
+Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben?&nbsp; Remember
+that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly malodorous and
+densely ignorant <i>bourgade</i>,<i> </i>where, however, the &ldquo;wit&rdquo;
+of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649.&nbsp; See
+the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.<br>
+<br>
+You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661-3), who has
+heard that the actor was &ldquo;a natural wit,&rdquo; and contracted
+and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben.&nbsp; I can
+scarcely believe that <i>these </i>were local traditions.&nbsp; How
+could these <i>rustauds </i>have an opinion about &ldquo;natural wit,&rdquo;
+how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?<br>
+<br>
+When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition.&nbsp;
+As has been stated, Beeston, &ldquo;the chronicle of the Stage&rdquo;
+(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.&nbsp; The story of the school-mastering
+and of Shakespeare &ldquo;knowing Latin pretty well,&rdquo; is of no
+value to me.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+But the story does not suit you, and you call it &ldquo;a mere myth,&rdquo;
+which, &ldquo;of course, will be believed by those who wish to believe
+it.&rdquo;&nbsp; But, most excellent of mortals, will it not, by parity
+of reasoning, &ldquo;of course be disbelieved by those who do <i>not
+</i>wish to believe it&rdquo;?<br>
+<br>
+And do you want to believe it?<br>
+<br>
+To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent instructor of
+younger players, you refer slightingly.&nbsp; They do not weigh with
+me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere (or Shakespeare) best
+in stage affairs.&nbsp; In reference to a very elliptic statement that,
+&ldquo;in <i>Hamlet </i>Betterton benefited by Shakespeare&rsquo;s coaching,&rdquo;
+you write, &ldquo;This is astonishing, seeing that Shakspere had been
+in his grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+There is a similar story about Betterton playing King Henry VIII.&nbsp;
+Betterton was said to have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed
+by Lowen, who was instructed by Shakspere!&rdquo; <a name="citation200a"></a><a href="#footnote200a">{200a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Why a note of exclamation?&nbsp; Who was Downes, and what were his opportunities
+of acquiring information?&nbsp; He &ldquo;was for many years book-keeper
+in the Duke&rsquo;s Company, first under Davenant in the old house .
+. . &rdquo;&nbsp; Davenant was notoriously the main link between &ldquo;the
+first and second Temple,&rdquo; the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as
+a boy, he knew, and the Restoration theatre.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; As his
+Book-keeper with the Duke of York&rsquo;s Company, Downes heard what
+Davenant had to tell; he also, for his <i>Roscius Anglicanus</i>,<i>
+</i>had notes from Charles Booth, prompter at Drury Lane.&nbsp; On May
+28, 1663, Davenant reproduced <i>Hamlet</i>,<i> </i>with young Betterton
+as the Prince of Denmark.&nbsp; Davenant, says Charles Booth, &ldquo;had
+seen the part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor
+had been instructed by the author, (not Bacon but) &ldquo;Mr. William
+Shakespeare,&rdquo; and Davenant &ldquo;taught Mr. Betterton in every
+particle of it.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Elton adds, &ldquo;We cannot be sure
+that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare himself.&nbsp; He is believed
+to have been a member of the King&rsquo;s Company before 1613, and to
+have left it for a time before Shakespeare&rsquo;s death.&rdquo; <a name="citation201a"></a><a href="#footnote201a">{201a}</a>&nbsp;
+His name is in the list in the Folio of &ldquo;the principall Actors
+in all these plays,&rdquo; but I cannot pretend to be certain that he
+played in them in Will&rsquo;s time.<br>
+<br>
+It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles Davenant&rsquo;s
+splendid revival of <i>Henry VIII</i>,<i> </i>in which Betterton, as
+the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old
+Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction &ldquo;from Mr. Shakespear himself.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Lowin, or Lowen, joined Shakespeare&rsquo;s Company in 1604, being then
+a man of twenty-eight.&nbsp; Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet
+and Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have &ldquo;understudies.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.<br>
+<br>
+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, &ldquo;all this is just
+a little mixed.&rdquo; <a name="citation201b"></a><a href="#footnote201b">{201b}</a>&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; I do not habitually believe in what I hear from
+&ldquo;the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,&rdquo; - 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.&nbsp;
+Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton&rsquo;s information),
+in 1709, about Shakespeare&rsquo;s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall
+said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes
+(Menzies?) said.&nbsp; But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left
+on record.&nbsp; But this evidence you explain away by &aelig;tiological
+guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with
+historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory
+myths.<br>
+<br>
+What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Men also had <i>Venus
+and Adonis</i>,<i> Lucrece</i>,<i> </i>and the Sonnets, which sold very
+poorly, and I do not wonder at it.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The <i>engouement </i>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.&nbsp;
+What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at Gorhambury,
+or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XI: THE FIRST FOLIO<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The First Folio&rdquo; is the name commonly given to the first
+collected edition of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for
+cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints,
+and everywhere.&nbsp; Their various discoveries do not win the assent
+of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.<br>
+<br>
+The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the
+Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable.&nbsp; The title-page says that
+<i>all </i>the contents are published &ldquo;according to the true original
+copies.&rdquo;&nbsp; If <i>only </i>MS. copies are meant, this is untrue;
+in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by
+MSS.&nbsp; The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote
+the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), <a name="citation207a"></a><a href="#footnote207a">{207a}</a>
+speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it.&nbsp; They say that
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s friends &ldquo;have collected and published&rdquo;
+the plays, have so published them &ldquo;that whereas you were abus&rsquo;d
+with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by
+the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: <i>even
+those</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(namely, the pieces previously ill-produced
+by pirates) &ldquo;are now offered to your view cur&rsquo;d, and perfect
+of their limbes; and <i>all the rest</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(that is, all
+the plays which had not been piratically debased), &ldquo;absolute in
+their numbers, as he conceived them.&rdquo;&nbsp; So obscure is the
+Preface that not <i>all </i>previously published separate plays are
+explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but &ldquo;<i>divers </i>stolen
+copies&rdquo; are denounced.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard makes the same point
+in <i>Shakespeare Folios and Quartos</i>,<i> </i>p. 2 (1909).<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+Some quartos, like that of <i>Hamlet </i>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&rsquo;s Company, or were
+sold, or stolen, is the question.&nbsp; Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds
+almost certain, that &ldquo;we have strong <i>prima facie </i>evidence
+that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the
+Stationers&rsquo; Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation208a"></a><a href="#footnote208a">{208a}</a><br>
+<br>
+The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed
+texts were good, but says that &ldquo;divers&rdquo; of them were stolen
+and deformed.&nbsp; My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally
+held.&nbsp; Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to <i>Much Ado about Nothing
+</i>(p. vi), says, &ldquo;We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare
+assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author&rsquo;s
+manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and
+surreptitious.&rdquo;&nbsp; I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface
+denounces <i>all </i>the Quartos.&nbsp; It could be truly said that
+<i>divers </i>stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on &ldquo;abused&rdquo;
+purchasers, and really no more <i>is </i>said.&nbsp; Dr. Furness writes,
+&ldquo;When we now find them using as &lsquo;copy&rsquo; one of these
+very Quartos&rdquo; (<i>Much Ado about Nothing</i>,<i> </i>1600), &ldquo;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 . . . &rdquo;&nbsp;
+That <i>was </i>their meaning, I think, the Quarto of <i>Much Ado </i>had
+<i>not </i>been &ldquo;maimed&rdquo; and &ldquo;deformed,&rdquo; as
+divers other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.<br>
+<br>
+Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his
+Company.&nbsp; I presume that his play was thus the common good of his
+Company and himself.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise
+than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition.&nbsp; They
+write, &ldquo;The natural inference to be drawn from this statement&rdquo;
+(in the Preface) &ldquo;is that <i>all </i>the separate editions of
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays were &lsquo;stolen,&rsquo; &lsquo;surreptitious&rsquo;
+and imperfect, <i>and that all those published in the Folio were printed
+from the author</i>&rsquo;<i>s own manuscripts</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(my
+italics).&nbsp; The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard,
+whose learned opinion coincides with my own.<br>
+<br>
+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&rsquo;s valuable book, based on the widest and most minute
+research, came into my hands.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;and were honestly obtained.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation210a"></a><a href="#footnote210a">{210a}</a>&nbsp;
+The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain
+maimed and disfigured texts.&nbsp; The Preface draws a distinction to
+this effect, &ldquo;even those&rdquo; (even the stolen and deformed
+copies) &ldquo;are now cured and perfect in their limbs,&rdquo; - that
+is, have been carefully edited, while &ldquo;<i>all the rest</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>are &ldquo;absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+own holograph copies.<br>
+<br>
+Among the plays spoken of as &ldquo;all the rest,&rdquo; namely, those
+not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, <i>Tempest</i>,<i>
+Two Gentlemen</i>,<i> Measure for Measure</i>,<i> Comedy of Errors</i>,<i>
+As You Like It</i>,<i> All</i>&rsquo;<i>s Well</i>,<i> Twelfth Night</i>,<i>
+Winter</i>&rsquo;<i>s Tale</i>,<i> Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>iii., <i>Henry
+VIII</i>,<i> Coriolanus</i>,<i> Timon</i>,<i> Julius C&aelig;sar</i>,<i>
+Macbeth</i>,<i> Antony and Cleopatra</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Cymbeline</i>.&nbsp;
+Also <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>i., ii., <i>King John</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Taming
+of the Shrew</i>,<i> </i>appeared now in other form than in the hitherto
+published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names.&nbsp; We have,
+moreover, no previous information as to <i>The Shrew</i>,<i> Timon</i>,<i>
+Julius C&aelig;sar</i>,<i> All</i>&rsquo;<i>s Well</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Henry
+VIII</i>.&nbsp; The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever
+Shakespeare thought, &ldquo;he uttered with that easinesse, that wee
+have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; The Preface takes it for granted that the selected
+manuscripts contain the plays &ldquo;absolute in their numbers as he
+conceived them.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the Preface does not commit itself,
+I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed
+from Shakespeare&rsquo;s own handwriting.&nbsp; After &ldquo;as he conceived
+them,&rdquo; it goes on, &ldquo;Who, as he was a most happy imitator
+of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it.&nbsp; 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.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+This may be meant to <i>suggest</i>,<i> </i>but does not <i>affirm</i>,<i>
+</i>that the actors <i>have </i>&ldquo;all the rest&rdquo; of the plays
+in Shakespeare&rsquo;s own handwriting.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts
+concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, &ldquo;the
+rest&rdquo; of the plays.<br>
+<br>
+These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors thought
+accurate, and some may have been &ldquo;fair copies&rdquo; in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his <i>prima cura</i>,<i>
+</i>his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free
+from blot or erasion.&nbsp; In one case at least, Shelley&rsquo;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.)&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received
+from Shakespeare.&nbsp; He remarks, in his posthumously published <i>Discoveries
+</i>(notes, memories, brief essays), &ldquo;I remember the players have
+<i>often </i>mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing
+(whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.<br>
+<br>
+As to the sources of such plays as had been &ldquo;maimed and deformed
+by injurious impostors,&rdquo; and are now &ldquo;offered cur&rsquo;d
+and perfect of their limbs,&rdquo; &ldquo;it can be proved to demonstration,&rdquo;
+say the Cambridge Editors, &ldquo;that several plays in the Folio were
+printed from earlier quarto editions&rdquo; (but the players secured
+a retreat on this point), &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; <i>Hamlet</i>,<i>
+</i>in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, &ldquo;differs
+for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better
+in twenty places.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+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 &ldquo;often said,&rdquo; and if they kept the originals,
+- out of some MSS. received from Shakspere?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; The editing of the Folio is so exquisitely careless
+that twelve printer&rsquo;s errors in a quarto of 1622, of <i>Richard
+III</i>,<i> </i>appear in the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; Again, the <i>Merry
+Wives </i>of the Folio, is nearly twice as long as the quarto of 1619,
+yet keeps old errors.<br>
+<br>
+How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also the large
+additions and improvements?&nbsp; 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?&nbsp; Did he, for the Folio of 1623, nearly double <i>The Merry
+Wives </i>in extent, and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto
+uncorrected?<br>
+<br>
+In that case how negligent was Bacon of his immortal works!&nbsp; Now
+Bacon was a scholar, and this absurd conduct cannot be imputed, I hope,
+to him.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Pollard is much more lenient than his fellow-scholars towards the
+Editor or Editors of the Folio.&nbsp; He concludes that &ldquo;manuscript
+copies of the plays were easily procurable.&rdquo;&nbsp; Sixteen out
+of the thirty-six plays existed in quartos.&nbsp; Eight of the sixteen
+were not used for the Folio; five were used, &ldquo;with additions,
+corrections, or alterations&rdquo; (which must have been made from manuscripts).&nbsp;
+Three quartos only were reprinted as they stood.&nbsp; 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. <a name="citation215a"></a><a href="#footnote215a">{215a}</a>&nbsp;
+They did make an attempt to divide their plays into Acts and Scenes,
+whereas the quartos, as a general rule, had been undivided.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The work is least ill done in the Comedies, and grows worse and worse
+as the Editor, or Bacon, or Bungay becomes intolerably slack.<br>
+<br>
+A great living author, who had a decent regard for his own works, could
+never have made or passed this slovenly Folio.&nbsp; Yet Mr. Greenwood
+argues that probably Bungay was still alive and active, after Shakspere
+was dead and buried.&nbsp; (Mr. Greenwood, of course, does not speak
+of Bungay, which I use as short for his Great Unknown.)&nbsp; Thus,
+<i>Richard III </i>from 1597 to 1622 appeared in six quartos.&nbsp;
+It is immensely improved in the Folio, and so are several other plays.&nbsp;
+Who made the improvements, which the Editors could only obtain in manuscripts?&nbsp;
+If we say that Shakespeare made them in MS., Mr. Greenwood asks, &ldquo;What
+had he to work upon, since, after selling his plays to his company,
+he did not preserve his manuscript?&rdquo; <a name="citation216a"></a><a href="#footnote216a">{216a}</a>&nbsp;
+Now I do not know that he did sell his plays to his company.&nbsp; We
+are sure that Will got money for them, but we do not know what arrangement
+he made with his company.&nbsp; He may have had an author&rsquo;s rights
+in addition to a sum down, as later was customary, and he had his regular
+share in the profits.&nbsp; Nor am I possessed of information that &ldquo;he
+did not preserve his manuscript.&rdquo;&nbsp; How can we know that?&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; The <i>Richard
+III </i>of the Folio contains, with much new matter, the printer&rsquo;s
+errors of the quarto of 1622.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s errors in the quarto.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood asks
+whether &ldquo;the natural conclusion is not that &lsquo;some person
+unknown&rsquo; took the Quarto of 1622, revised it, added the new passages,
+and thus put it into the form in which it appeared in 1623.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; And so on in other plays similarly treated.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Is it not a more natural conclusion that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;&rdquo;
+(Bungay) &ldquo;himself revised its publication, and that some part
+of this revision, at any rate, was done after 1616 and before 1623.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation217a"></a><a href="#footnote217a">{217a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, after criticising other systems, writes, <a name="citation217b"></a><a href="#footnote217b">{217b}</a>
+&ldquo;There is, of course, another hypothesis.&nbsp; It is that Shakespeare&rdquo;
+(meaning the real author) &ldquo;did not die in 1616,&rdquo; and here
+follows the usual notion that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; was the &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>of that transcendent genius, &ldquo;moving
+in Court circles among the highest of his day (as assuredly Shakespeare
+must have moved) - who wished to conceal his identity.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I have not the shadow of assurance that the Author &ldquo;moved in Court
+circles,&rdquo; though Will would see a good deal when he played at
+Court, and in the houses of nobles, before &ldquo;Eliza and our James.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I never moved in Court circles: Mr. Greenwood must know them better
+than I do, and I have explained (see <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Shakespeare</i>,<i> Genius</i>,<i> and Society</i>)<i>
+</i>how Will picked up his notions of courtly ways.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Another hypothesis,&rdquo; the Baconian hypothesis, - &ldquo;<i>nom
+de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>and all, - Mr. Greenwood thinks &ldquo;an
+extremely reasonable one&rdquo;: I cannot easily conceive of one more
+unreasonable.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;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 &lsquo;literary man,&rsquo; to some &lsquo;good pen,&rsquo;
+who was at the time doing work for him; and why not to the man who wrote
+the commendatory verses, the &lsquo;Lines to the Reader&rsquo;&rdquo;
+(opposite to the engraving), &ldquo;and, as seems certain, the Preface,
+&lsquo;to the great variety of Readers&rsquo;?&rdquo; <a name="citation218a"></a><a href="#footnote218a">{218a}</a><br>
+<br>
+That man, that &ldquo;good pen,&rdquo; was Ben Jonson.&nbsp; On the
+&ldquo;supposing&rdquo; of Mr. Greenwood, Ben is &ldquo;doing work for&rdquo;
+the Great Unknown at the time when &ldquo;the business&rdquo; following
+on the &ldquo;idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which
+had been written under the name of Shakespeare&rdquo; occurred to the
+illustrious but unknown owner of that &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+In plain words of my own, - the Author may have entrusted &ldquo;the
+business,&rdquo; and what was that business if not the editing of the
+Folio? - to Ben Jonson - &ldquo;who was at the time doing work for him&rdquo;
+- for the Author.<br>
+<br>
+Here is a clue!&nbsp; We only need to know for what man of &ldquo;transcendent
+genius, universal culture, world-wide philosophy . . . moving in Court
+circles,&rdquo; and so on, Ben &ldquo;was working&rdquo; about 1621-3,
+the Folio appearing in 1623.<br>
+<br>
+The heart beats with anticipation of a discovery!&nbsp; &ldquo;On January
+22, 1621, Bacon celebrated his sixtieth birthday with great state at
+York House.&nbsp; Jonson was present,&rdquo; and wrote an ode, with
+something about the Genius of the House (<i>Lar </i>or Brownie),<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thou stand&rsquo;st as if some mystery thou didst.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood does not know what this can mean; nor do I. <a name="citation219a"></a><a href="#footnote219a">{219a}</a><br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Jonson, it appears&rdquo; (on what authority?),<i> </i>&ldquo;was
+Bacon&rsquo;s guest at Gorhambury, and was one of those good &lsquo;pens,&rsquo;&rdquo;
+of whom Bacon speaks as assisting him in the translation of some of
+his books into Latin.<br>
+<br>
+Bacon, writing to Toby Mathew, June 26, 1623, mentions the help of &ldquo;some
+good pens,&rdquo; Ben Jonson he does not mention.&nbsp; But Judge Webb
+does.&nbsp; &ldquo;It is an undoubted fact,&rdquo; says Judge Webb,
+&ldquo;that the Latin of the <i>De Augmentis</i>,<i> </i>which was published
+in 1623, was the work of Jonson.&rdquo; <a name="citation219b"></a><a href="#footnote219b">{219b}</a>&nbsp;
+To whom Mr. Collins replies, &ldquo;There is not a particle of evidence
+that Jonson gave to Bacon the smallest assistance in translating any
+of his works into Latin.&rdquo; <a name="citation219c"></a><a href="#footnote219c">{219c}</a><br>
+<br>
+<i>Tr&egrave;s bien</i>,<i> </i>on Judge Webb&rsquo;s assurance the
+person for whom Ben was working, in 1623, was Bacon.&nbsp; Meanwhile,
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s &ldquo;supposing&rdquo; is &ldquo;that there was
+such an author&rdquo; (of transcendent genius, and so on), who &ldquo;may
+have entrusted the editing of his collected plays&rdquo; to some &ldquo;good
+pen,&rdquo; who was at the time &ldquo;doing work for him,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;why not to&rdquo; - Ben Jonson. <a name="citation220a"></a><a href="#footnote220a">{220a}</a>&nbsp;
+Now the man for whom Ben, in 1623, was &ldquo;doing work&rdquo; - was
+BACON, - so Judge Webb says. <a name="citation220b"></a><a href="#footnote220b">{220b}</a><br>
+<br>
+Therefore, by this hypothesis of Mr. Greenwood, <a name="citation220c"></a><a href="#footnote220c">{220c}</a>
+the Great Unknown was Bacon, - just the hypothesis of the common Baconian.<br>
+<br>
+Is my reasoning erroneous?&nbsp; Is the &ldquo;supposing&rdquo; suggested
+by Mr. Greenwood <a name="citation220d"></a><a href="#footnote220d">{220d}</a>
+any other than that of Miss Delia Bacon, and Judge Webb?&nbsp; True,
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s Baconian &ldquo;supposing&rdquo; is only a working
+hypothesis: not a confirmed belief.&nbsp; But it is useful to his argument
+(see &ldquo;Ben Jonson and Shakespeare&rdquo;)<i> </i>when he wants
+to explain away Ben&rsquo;s evidence, in his verses in the Folio, to
+the Stratford actor as the Author.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood writes, in the first page of his Preface: &ldquo;It is
+no part of my plan or intention to defend that theory,&rdquo; &ldquo;the
+Baconian theory.&rdquo;&nbsp; Apparently it pops out contrary to the
+intention of Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; But pop out it does: at least I can
+find no flaw in the reasoning of my detection of Bacon: I see no way
+out of it except this: after recapitulating what is said about Ben as
+one of Bacon&rsquo;s &ldquo;good pens&rdquo; with other details, Mr.
+Greenwood says, &ldquo;But no doubt that way madness lies!&rdquo; <a name="citation221a"></a><a href="#footnote221a">{221a}</a>&nbsp;
+Ah no! not madness, no, but Baconism &ldquo;lies that way.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+However, &ldquo;let it be granted&rdquo; (as Euclid says in his sportsmanlike
+way) that Mr. Greenwood by no means thinks that his &ldquo;concealed
+poet&rdquo; is Bacon - only some one similar and similarly situated
+and still active in 1623, and occupied with other business than supervising
+a collected edition of plays written under his &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>of Shakespeare.&nbsp; Bacon, too, was busy, with supervising, or
+toiling at the Latin translation of his scientific works, and Ben (according
+to Judge Webb) was busy in turning the <i>Advancement of Learning </i>into
+Latin prose.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood quotes, without reference, Archbishop
+Tenison as saying that Ben helped Bacon in doing his works into Latin.
+<a name="citation221b"></a><a href="#footnote221b">{221b}</a>&nbsp;
+Tenison is a very late witness.&nbsp; The prophetic soul of Bacon did
+not quite trust English to last as long as Latin, or he thought Latin,
+the <i>lingua franca </i>of Europe in his day, more easily accessible
+to foreign students, as, of course, it was.&nbsp; Thus Bacon was very
+busy; so was Ben.&nbsp; The sad consequence of Ben&rsquo;s business,
+perhaps, is that the editing of the Folio is notoriously bad; whether
+Ben were the Editor or not, it is infamously bad.<br>
+<br>
+Conceivably Mr. Greenwood is of the same opinion.&nbsp; He says, &ldquo;It
+stands admitted that a very large part of that volume&rdquo; (the Folio)
+&ldquo;consists of work that is not &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo;
+at all.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+How strange, if Ben edited it for the Great Unknown - who knew, if any
+human being knew, what work was &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo;!&nbsp;
+On Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s hypothesis, <a name="citation222a"></a><a href="#footnote222a">{222a}</a>
+or &ldquo;supposing,&rdquo; the Unknown Author &ldquo;may well have
+conceived the idea of publishing a collected edition of the plays which
+had been written&rdquo; (not &ldquo;published,&rdquo; <i>written</i>)<i>
+</i>&ldquo;under the name of Shakespeare, and, being himself busy with
+other matters, he may have entrusted the business to&rdquo; some &ldquo;good
+pen,&rdquo; &ldquo;and why not to&rdquo; - Ben.&nbsp; Nevertheless &ldquo;a
+very large part of that volume consists of work that is not &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo;
+at all.&rdquo; <a name="citation222b"></a><a href="#footnote222b">{222b}</a>&nbsp;
+How did this occur?&nbsp; The book <a name="citation222c"></a><a href="#footnote222c">{222c}</a>
+is &ldquo;that very doubtful &lsquo;canon.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; How,
+if &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rdquo; man edited it for &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;?&nbsp;
+Did &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; not care what stuff was placed under his
+immortal &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;?<br>
+<br>
+It is not my fault if I think that Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s hypotheses
+<a name="citation222d"></a><a href="#footnote222d">{222d}</a> - the
+genuine &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; either revised his own works, or put
+Ben on the editorial task - are absolutely contradicted by his statements
+in another part of his book. <a name="citation222e"></a><a href="#footnote222e">{222e}</a>&nbsp;
+For the genuine &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; knew what plays he had written,
+knew what he could honestly put forth as his own, as &ldquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Or, if he placed the task of editing in Ben&rsquo;s hands, he must have
+told Ben what plays were of his own making.&nbsp; In either case the
+Folio would contain these, and no others.&nbsp; But - &ldquo;the <i>plat
+contraire</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>- the very reverse, - is stated by Mr.
+Greenwood.&nbsp; &ldquo;It stands admitted that a very large portion
+of that volume&rdquo; (the Folio) &ldquo;consists of work that is not
+&lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;s&rsquo;&rdquo; (is not Bacon&rsquo;s, or the
+other man&rsquo;s) &ldquo;at all.&rdquo; <a name="citation223a"></a><a href="#footnote223a">{223a}</a>&nbsp;
+Then away fly the hypotheses <a name="citation223b"></a><a href="#footnote223b">{223b}</a>
+that the auto-Shakespeare, or that Ben, employed by the auto-Shakespeare
+(apparently Bacon) revised, edited, and prepared for publication the
+auto-Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; For Mr. Greenwood &ldquo;has already
+dealt with <i>Titus </i>(<i>Andronicus</i>)<i> </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation223c"></a><a href="#footnote223c">{223c}</a> and proved
+them not to be auto-Shakespearean - and he adds &ldquo;there are many
+other plays in that very doubtful &lsquo;canon&rsquo;&rdquo; (the Folio)
+&ldquo;which, by universal admission, contain much non-Shakespearean
+composition.&rdquo; <a name="citation223d"></a><a href="#footnote223d">{223d}</a>&nbsp;
+Perhaps! but if so the two hypotheses, <a name="citation223e"></a><a href="#footnote223e">{223e}</a>
+that either the genuine Shakespeare <a name="citation223f"></a><a href="#footnote223f">{223f}</a>
+revised (&ldquo;is it not a more natural solution that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;
+himself revised his works for publication, and that some part, at any
+rate, of this revision <a name="citation223g"></a><a href="#footnote223g">{223g}</a>
+was done after 1616 and before 1623?&rdquo;), or <a name="citation223h"></a><a href="#footnote223h">{223h}</a>
+that he gave Ben (who was working, by the conjecture, for Bacon) the
+task of editing the Folio, - are annihilated.&nbsp; For neither the
+auto-Shakespeare (if honest), nor Ben (if sober), could have stuffed
+the Folio full of non-Shakespearean work, - including four &ldquo;non-Shakespearean&rdquo;
+plays, - nor could the Folio be &ldquo;that very doubtful canon.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation224a"></a><a href="#footnote224a">{224a}</a>&nbsp;
+Again, if either the auto-Shakespeare or Ben following his instructions,
+were Editor, neither could have, as the Folio Editor had &ldquo;evidently
+no little doubt about&rdquo; <i>Troilus and Cressida.</i> <a name="citation224b"></a><a href="#footnote224b">{224b}</a><br>
+<br>
+Neither Ben, nor the actual Simon Pure, the author, the auto-Shakespeare,
+could fail to know the truth about <i>Trodus and Cressida</i>.&nbsp;
+But the Editor <a name="citation224c"></a><a href="#footnote224c">{224c}</a>
+did <i>not </i>know the truth, the whole canon is &ldquo;doubtful.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Therefore the hypothesis, the &ldquo;supposing,&rdquo; that the actual
+author did the revising, <a name="citation224d"></a><a href="#footnote224d">{224d}</a>
+and the other hypothesis that he gave Ben the work, <a name="citation224e"></a><a href="#footnote224e">{224e}</a>
+seem to me wholly impossible.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood needs the &ldquo;supposings&rdquo;
+of pp. 290, 293; and as he rejects <i>Titus Andronicus </i>and <i>Henry
+VI </i>(both in the Folio), he also needs the contradictory views of
+pp. 351, 358.&nbsp; On which set of supposings and averments does he
+stand to win?<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps he thinks to find a way out of what appears to me to be a dilemma
+in the following fashion: He will not accept <i>Titus Andronicus </i>and
+<i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>though both are in the Folio, as the work of
+<i>his </i>&ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; his Unknown, the Bacon of the
+Baconians.&nbsp; Well, we ask, if your Unknown, or Bacon, or Ben, -
+instructed by Bacon, or by the Unknown, - edited the Folio, how could
+any one of the three insert <i>Titus</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>,<i>
+</i>and be &ldquo;in no little doubt about&rdquo; <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>?&nbsp;
+Bacon, or the Unknown, or the Editor employed by either, knew perfectly
+well which plays either man could honestly claim as his own work, done
+under the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>of &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare&rdquo; (with or without the hyphen).&nbsp; Yet the Editor
+of the Folio does not know - and Mr. Greenwood does know - <i>Henry
+VI </i>and <i>Titus </i>are &ldquo;wrong ones.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s way out, if I follow him, is this: <a name="citation225a"></a><a href="#footnote225a">{225a}</a>
+&ldquo;Judge Stotsenburg asks, &lsquo;Who wrote <i>The Taming of a Shrew
+</i>printed in 1594, and who wrote <i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> Henry
+VI</i>,<i> </i>or <i>King Lear </i>referred to in the Diary?&rsquo;&rdquo;
+(Henslowe&rsquo;s).&nbsp; The Judge continues: &ldquo;Neither Collier
+nor any of the Shaxper commentators make (<i>sic</i>)<i> </i>any claim
+to their authorship in behalf of William Shaxper.&nbsp; Since these
+plays have the same names as those included in the Folio of 1623 the
+presumption is that they are the same plays until the contrary is shown.&nbsp;
+Of course it may be shown, either that those in the Folio are entirely
+different except in name, or that these plays were revised, improved,
+and dressed by some one whom they&rdquo; (who?) &ldquo;called Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood says, &ldquo;My own conviction is that . . . these plays
+were &lsquo;revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare.&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation226a"></a><a href="#footnote226a">{226a}</a>&nbsp;
+(Whom <i>who </i>called Shakespeare?)&nbsp; In that case these plays,
+- say <i>Titus Andronicus </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part 1, -
+which Mr. Greenwood denies to <i>his &ldquo;</i>Shakespeare&rdquo; were
+just as much <i>his </i>Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays as any other plays
+(and there are several), which <i>his </i>Shakespeare &ldquo;revised,
+improved, and dressed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet <i>his </i>Shakespeare is <i>not
+</i>author of <i>Henry VI</i>, <a name="citation226b"></a><a href="#footnote226b">{226b}</a><i>
+</i>not the author of <i>Titus Andronicus</i>. <a name="citation226c"></a><a href="#footnote226c">{226c}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Mr. Anders,&rdquo; writes Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;makes what I
+think to be a great error in citing <i>Henry VI </i>and <i>Titus </i>as
+genuine plays of Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a name="citation226d"></a><a href="#footnote226d">{226d}</a><br>
+<br>
+He hammers at this denial in nineteen references in his Index to <i>Titus
+Andronicus</i>.&nbsp; Yet Ben, or Bacon, or the Unknown thought that
+these plays <i>were </i>&ldquo;genuine plays&rdquo; of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+the concealed author - Bacon or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s man.&nbsp; It
+appears that the immense poet who used the &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i>
+</i>of &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; did not know the plays of which he
+could rightfully call himself the author; that (not foreseeing Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+constantly repeated objections) he boldly annexed four plays, or two
+certainly, which Mr. Greenwood denies to him, and another about which
+&ldquo;the Folio Editor was in no little doubt.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Finally, <a name="citation227a"></a><a href="#footnote227a">{227a}</a>
+Mr. Greenwood is &ldquo;convinced,&rdquo; &ldquo;it is my conviction&rdquo;
+that some plays which he often denies to his &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo;
+were &ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; That some one, if he edited or caused to be
+edited the Folio, thought that his revision, improvement, and dressing
+up of the plays gave him a right to claim their authorship - and Mr.
+Greenwood, a dozen times and more, denies to him their authorship.<br>
+<br>
+One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic&rsquo;s meaning.&nbsp;
+<i>The Taming of a Shrew</i>,<i> Titus</i>,<i> Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>and
+<i>King Lear</i>,<i> </i>referred to in Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Diary,&rdquo;
+are not &ldquo;Shakespearean,&rdquo; we are repeatedly told.&nbsp; But
+&ldquo;my own conviction is that . . . &rdquo; these plays were &ldquo;revised,
+improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But to be revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called
+Shakespeare, is to be as truly &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; work as is
+any play so handled &ldquo;by Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus the plays
+mentioned are as truly &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo; as any others in
+which &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; worked on an earlier canvas, and also
+<i>Titus </i>&ldquo;is not <i>Shakespearean </i>at all.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood, I repeat, constantly denies the &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo;
+character to <i>Titus </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;The conclusion
+of the whole matter is that <i>Titus </i>and <i>The Trilogy of Henry
+VI </i>are not the work of Shakespeare: that his hand is probably not
+to be found at all in <i>Titus</i>,<i> </i>and only once or twice, if
+at all, in <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part I, but that he it probably was
+who altered and remodelled the two parts of the old <i>Contention of
+the Houses of York and Lancaster</i>,<i> </i>thereby producing <i>Henry
+VI</i>,<i> </i>Parts II and III.&rdquo; <a name="citation228a"></a><a href="#footnote228a">{228a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Yet <a name="citation228b"></a><a href="#footnote228b">{228b}</a> <i>Titus
+</i>and <i>Henry VI </i>appear as &ldquo;revised, improved, and dressed&rdquo;
+by the mysterious &ldquo;some one whom they called Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+If Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s conclusion <a name="citation228c"></a><a href="#footnote228c">{228c}</a>
+be correct, &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; had no right to place <i>Henry
+VI</i>,<i> </i>Part I, and <i>Titus </i>in his Folio.&nbsp; If his &ldquo;conviction&rdquo;
+<a name="citation228d"></a><a href="#footnote228d">{228d}</a> be correct,
+Shakespeare had as good a right to them as to any of the plays which
+he revised, and improved, and dressed.&nbsp; They <i>must </i>be &ldquo;Shakespearean&rdquo;
+if Mr. Greenwood is right <a name="citation228e"></a><a href="#footnote228e">{228e}</a>
+in his suggestion that &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; either revised his
+works for publication between 1616 and 1623, or set his man, Ben Jonson,
+upon that business.&nbsp; Yet neither one nor the other knew what to
+make of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Folio Editor had,
+evidently, no little doubt about that play.&rdquo; <a name="citation228f"></a><a href="#footnote228f">{228f}</a><br>
+<br>
+So neither &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; nor Ben, instructed by him, can
+have been &ldquo;the Folio Editor.&rdquo;&nbsp; Consequently Mr. Greenwood
+must abandon his suggestion that either man was the Editor, and may
+return to his rejection of <i>Titus </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>, Part I.&nbsp;
+But he clings to it.&nbsp; He finds in Henslowe&rsquo;s Diary &ldquo;references
+to, and records of the writing of, such plays&rdquo; as, among others,
+<i>Titus Andronicus</i>,<i> </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>. <a name="citation229a"></a><a href="#footnote229a">{229a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, after rejecting a theory of some one, says, &ldquo;Far
+more likely does it appear that there was a great man of the time whose
+genius was capable of &lsquo;transforming dross into gold,&rsquo; who
+took these plays, and, in great part, rewrote and revised them, leaving
+sometimes more, and sometimes less of the original work; and that so
+rewritten, revised, and transformed they appeared as the plays of &lsquo;Shake-speare.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+<a name="citation229b"></a><a href="#footnote229b">{229b}</a><br>
+<br>
+This statement is made <a name="citation229c"></a><a href="#footnote229c">{229c}</a>
+about &ldquo;these plays,&rdquo; including <i>Titus Andronicus </i>and
+<i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>while <a name="citation229d"></a><a href="#footnote229d">{229d}</a>
+&ldquo;<i>Titus </i>and the <i>Trilogy of Henry VI </i>are not the work
+of Shakespeare . . . his hand is probably not to be found at all in
+<i>Titus</i>,<i> </i>and only once or twice in <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part
+I,&rdquo; though he probably made Parts II and III out of older plays.<br>
+<br>
+I do not know where to have the critic.&nbsp; If <i>Henry VI</i>,<i>
+</i>Part I, and <i>Titus </i>are in no sense by &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+then neither &ldquo;Shakespeare nor Ben for him edited or had anything
+to do with the editing of the Folio.&nbsp; If either or both had to
+do with the editing, as the critic suggests, then he is wrong in denying
+Shakespearean origin to <i>Titus </i>and <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part
+I.<br>
+<br>
+Of course one sees a way out of the dilemma for the great auto-Shakespeare
+himself, who, by one hypothesis, handed over the editing of his plays
+to Ben (<i>he</i>,<i> </i>by Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s &ldquo;supposing,&rdquo;
+was deviling at literary jobs for Bacon).&nbsp; The auto-Shakespeare
+merely tells Ben to edit his plays, and never even gives him a list
+of them.&nbsp; Then Ben brings him the Folio, and the author looks at
+the list of Plays.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Mr. Jonson,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;I have hitherto held thee
+for an honest scholar and a deserving man in the quality thou dost profess.&nbsp;
+But thou hast brought me a maimed and deformed printed copy of that
+which I did write for my own recreation, not wishful to be known for
+so light a thing as a poet.&nbsp; Moreover, thou hast placed among these
+my trifles, four plays to which I never put a finger, and others in
+which I had no more than a thumb.&nbsp; The Seneschal, Mr. Jonson, will
+pay thee what is due to thee; thy fardels shall be sent whithersoever
+thou wilt, and, Mary!&nbsp; Mr. Jonson, I bid thee never more be officer
+of mine.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+This painful discourse must have been held at Gorhambury, - if Ben edited
+the Folio - for Francis.<br>
+<br>
+It is manifest, I hope, that about the Folio Mr. Greenwood speaks with
+two voices, and these very discordant.&nbsp; It is also manifest that,
+whoever wrote the plays left his materials in deep neglect, and that,
+when they were collected, some one gathered them up in extreme disorder.&nbsp;
+It is extraordinary that the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood do not see
+the fallacy of their own reasoning in this matter of the Folio.&nbsp;
+They constantly ridicule the old view that the actor, Will Shakspere
+(if, by miracle, he were the author of the plays), could have left them
+to take their fortunes.&nbsp; They are asked, what did other playwrights
+do in that age?&nbsp; They often parted with their whole copyright to
+the actors of this or that company, or to Henslowe.&nbsp; The new owners
+could alter the plays at will, and were notoriously anxious to keep
+them out of print, lest other companies should act them.&nbsp; As Mr.
+Greenwood writes, <a name="citation231a"></a><a href="#footnote231a">{231a}</a>
+&ldquo;Such, we are told, was the universal custom with dramatists of
+the day; they &lsquo;kept no copies&rsquo; of their plays, and thought
+no more about them.&nbsp; It will, I suppose, be set down to fanaticism
+that I should doubt the truth of this proposition, that I doubt if it
+be consonant with the known facts of human nature.&rdquo;&nbsp; But
+whom, except Jonson, does Mr. Greenwood find editing and publishing
+his plays?&nbsp; Beaumont, Fletcher, Heywood?&nbsp; No!<br>
+<br>
+If the Great Unknown were dead in 1623, his negligence was as bad as
+Will&rsquo;s.&nbsp; If he were alive and revised his own work for publication,
+<a name="citation231b"></a><a href="#footnote231b">{231b}</a> he did
+it as the office cat might have done it in hours of play.&nbsp; If,
+on the other side, he handed the editorial task over to Ben, <a name="citation232a"></a><a href="#footnote232a">{232a}</a>
+then he did not even give Ben a list of his genuine works.&nbsp; Mr.
+Greenwood cites the case of Ben Jonson, a notorious and, I think, solitary
+exception.&nbsp; Ben was and often proclaimed himself to be essentially
+a scholar.&nbsp; He took as much pains in prefacing, editing, and annotating
+his plays, as he would have taken had the texts been those of Greek
+tragedians.<br>
+<br>
+Finally, all Baconians cry out against the sottish behaviour of the
+actor, Will, if being really the author of the plays, he did not bestir
+himself, and bring them out in a collected edition.&nbsp; Yet no English
+dramatist ventured on doing such a thing, till Ben thus collected his
+&ldquo;works&rdquo; (and was laughed at) in 1616.&nbsp; The example
+might have encouraged Will to be up and doing, but he died early in
+1616.&nbsp; If Will were <i>not </i>the author, what care was Bacon,
+or the Unknown, taking of his many manuscript plays, and for the proper
+editing of those which had appeared separately in pamphlets?&nbsp; As
+indolent and casual as Will, the great Author, Bacon or another, left
+the plays to take their chances.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood says that &ldquo;<i>if
+the author</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(Bacon or somebody very like him) &ldquo;<i>had
+been careless about keeping copies of his manuscripts . . . </i>&rdquo;
+<a name="citation232b"></a><a href="#footnote232b">{232b}</a>&nbsp;
+What an &ldquo;if&rdquo; in the case of the great Author!&nbsp; This
+gross neglect, infamous in Will, may thus have been practised by the
+Great Unknown himself.<br>
+<br>
+In 1911 Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;There is overwhelming authority
+for the view that <i>Titus Andronicus </i>is not <i>Shakespearean </i>at
+all.&rdquo; <a name="citation233a"></a><a href="#footnote233a">{233a}</a>&nbsp;
+In that case, neither Bacon, nor the Unknown, nor Ben, acting for either,
+can have been the person who put <i>Titus </i>into the Folio.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XII: BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The evidence of Ben Jonson to the identity of Shakespeare the author
+with Shakspere the actor, is &ldquo;the strength of the Stratfordian
+faith,&rdquo; says Mr. Greenwood.&nbsp; &ldquo;But I think it will be
+admitted that the various Jonsonian utterances with regard to &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo;
+are by no means easy to reconcile one with the other.&rdquo; <a name="citation237a"></a><a href="#footnote237a">{237a}</a><br>
+<br>
+It is difficult to reply briefly to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s forty-seven
+pages about the evidence of Jonson.&nbsp; But, first, whenever in written
+words or in reported conversation, Ben speaks of Shakespeare by name,
+he speaks of his <i>works: </i>in 1619 to Drummond of Hawthornden; in
+1623 in commendatory verses to the Folio; while, about 1630, probably,
+in his posthumously published <i>Discourses</i>,<i> </i>he writes on
+Shakespeare as the friend and &ldquo;fellow&rdquo; of the players, on
+Shakespeare as his own friend, and as a dramatist.&nbsp; On each of
+these three occasions, Ben&rsquo;s <i>tone </i>varies.&nbsp; In 1619
+he said no more to Drummond of Hawthornden (apparently on two separate
+occasions) than that Shakespeare &ldquo;lacked art,&rdquo; and made
+the mistake about a wreck on the sea-coast of Bohemia.<br>
+<br>
+In 1619, Ben spoke gruffly and briefly of Shakespeare, as to Drummond
+he also spoke disparagingly of Beaumont, whom he had panegyrised in
+an epigram in his own folio of 1616, and was again to praise in the
+commendatory verses in the Folio.&nbsp; He spoke still more harshly
+of Drayton, whom in 1616 he had compared to Homer, Virgil, Theocritus,
+and Tyr&aelig;us!&nbsp; He told an unkind anecdote of Marston, with
+whom he had first quarrelled and then made friends, collaborating with
+him in a play; and very generously and to his great peril, sharing his
+imprisonment.&nbsp; To Drummond, Jonson merely said that he &ldquo;beat
+Marston and took away his pistol.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of Sir John Beaumont,
+brother of the dramatist, Ben had written a most hyperbolical eulogy
+in verse; luckily for Sir John, to Drummond Ben did not speak of him.&nbsp;
+Such was Ben, in panegyric verse hyperbolical; in conversation &ldquo;a
+despiser of others, and praiser of himself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Compare Ben&rsquo;s
+three remarks about Donne, all made to Drummond.&nbsp; Donne deserved
+hanging for breaking metre; Donne would perish for not being understood:
+and Donne was in some points the first of living poets.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s effort to disable Jonson&rsquo;s evidence rests
+on the contradictions in his estimates of Shakespeare&rsquo;s poetry,
+in notices scattered through some thirty years.&nbsp; Jonson, it is
+argued, cannot on each occasion mean Will.&nbsp; He must now mean Will,
+now the Great Unknown, and now - both at once.&nbsp; Yet I have proved
+that Ben was the least consistent of critics, all depended on the occasion,
+and on his humour at the moment.&nbsp; This is a commonplace of literary
+history.&nbsp; The Baconians do not know it; Mr. Greenwood, if he knows
+it, ignores it, and bases his argument on facts which may be unknown
+to his readers.&nbsp; We have noted Ben&rsquo;s words of 1619, and touched
+on his panegyric of 1623.&nbsp; Thirdly, about 1630 probably, Ben wrote
+in his manuscript book <i>Discourses </i>an affectionate but critical
+page on Shakespeare as a man and an author.&nbsp; Always, in prose,
+and in verse, and in recorded conversation, Ben explicitly identified
+Shakspere (William, of Stratford) with the author of the plays usually
+ascribed to him.&nbsp; But the Baconian Judge Webb (in extreme old age),
+and the anti-Shakespearean Mr. Greenwood and others, choose to interpret
+Ben&rsquo;s words on the theory that, in 1623, he &ldquo;had his tongue
+in his cheek&rdquo;; that, like Odysseus, he &ldquo;mingled things false
+with true,&rdquo; that <i>they </i>know what is true from what is false,
+and can undo the many knots which Ben tied in his tongue.&nbsp; How
+they succeed we shall see.<br>
+<br>
+In addition to his three known mentions of Shakespeare by name (1619,
+1623, 1630?),<i> </i>Ben certainly appears to satirise his rival at
+a much earlier date; especially as Pantalabus, a playwright in <i>The
+Poetaster </i>(1601), and as actor, poet, and plagiarist in an epigram,
+<i>Poet-Ape</i>,<i> </i>published in his collected works of 1616; but
+probably written as early as 1602.&nbsp; It is well known that in 1598
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s company acted Ben&rsquo;s <i>Every Man in His Humour</i>.&nbsp;
+It appears that he conceived some grudge against the actors, and apparently
+against Shakespeare and other playwrights, for, in 1601, his <i>Poetaster
+</i>is a satire both on playwrights and on actors, whom he calls &ldquo;apes.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The apparent attacks on Shakespeare are just such as Ben, if angry and
+envious, would direct against him; while we know of no other poet-player
+of the period to whom they could apply.&nbsp; For example, in <i>The
+Poetaster</i>,<i> </i>Histrio, the actor, is advised to ingratiate himself
+with <i>Pantalabus</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;gent&rsquo;man parcel-poet, his
+father was a man of worship, I tell thee.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is perhaps
+unmistakably a blow at Shakespeare, who had recently acquired for his
+father and himself arms, and the pleasure of writing himself &ldquo;gentleman.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This &ldquo;parcel-poet gent&rsquo;man&rdquo; &ldquo;pens lofty, in
+a new stalking style,&rdquo; - he is thus an author, he &ldquo;pens,&rdquo;
+and in a high style.&nbsp; He is called <i>Pantalabus</i>,<i> </i>from
+the Greek words for &ldquo;to <i>take up all</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>which
+means that, as poet, he is a plagiarist.&nbsp; Jonson repeats this charge
+in his verses called <i>Poet-Ape -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>&ldquo;<i>He takes up all</i>,&rdquo; makes each man&rsquo;s wit
+his own,<br>
+And told of this, he slights it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In a scene added to <i>The Poetaster </i>in 1616, the author (Ben) is
+advised not<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;With a sad and serious verse to wound<br>
+Pantalabus, railing in his saucy jests,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+and obviously slighting the charges of plagiarism.&nbsp; Perhaps Ben
+is glancing at Shakespeare, who, if accused of plagiary by an angry
+rival, would merely laugh.<br>
+<br>
+A reply to the <i>Poetaster</i>,<i> </i>namely <i>Satiromastix </i>(by
+Dekker and Marston?),<i> </i>introduces Jonson himself as babbling darkly
+about &ldquo;Mr. Justice Shallow,&rdquo; and &ldquo;an Innocent Moor&rdquo;
+(Othello?)<i>.&nbsp; </i>Here is question of &ldquo;administering strong
+pills&rdquo; to Jonson; <i>then</i>,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What lumps of hard and indigested stuff,<br>
+Of bitter <i>Satirism</i>,<i> </i>of <i>Arrogance</i>,<br>
+Of <i>Self-love</i>,<i> </i>of <i>Detraction</i>,<i> </i>of a black<br>
+And stinking <i>Insolence </i>should we fetch up!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+This &ldquo;pill&rdquo; is a reply to Ben&rsquo;s &ldquo;purge&rdquo;
+for the poets in his <i>Poetaster</i>.&nbsp; Oh, the sad old stuff!<br>
+<br>
+Referring to Jonson&rsquo;s <i>Poetaster</i>,<i> </i>and to <i>Satiromastix</i>,<i>
+</i>the counter-attack, we find a passage in the Cambridge play, <i>The
+Return from Parnassus </i>(about 1602).&nbsp; Burbage, the tragic actor,
+and Kempe, the low-comedy man of Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, are introduced,
+discussing the possible merits of Cambridge wits as playwrights.&nbsp;
+Kempe rejects them as they &ldquo;smell too much of that writer Ovid,
+and that writer Metamorphosis . . . &rdquo;&nbsp; The purpose, of course,
+is to laugh at the ignorance of the low-comedy man, who thinks &ldquo;Metamorphosis&rdquo;
+a writer, and does not suspect - how should he? - that Shakespeare &ldquo;smells
+of Ovid.&rdquo;&nbsp; Kempe innocently goes on, &ldquo;Why, here&rsquo;s
+our fellow&rdquo; (comrade) &ldquo;Shakespeare puts them all down&rdquo;
+(all the University playwrights), &ldquo;aye, and Ben Jonson too.&nbsp;
+O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace&rdquo;
+(in <i>The Poetaster</i>)<i> </i>&ldquo;giving the poets a pill, but
+our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge . . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not purge) which,
+in <i>Satiromastix</i>,<i> </i>might be administered to Jonson.&nbsp;
+The Cambridge author may have thought that Shakespeare wrote the passage
+on the pill which was to &ldquo;fetch up&rdquo; masses of Ben&rsquo;s
+insolence, self-love, arrogance, and detraction.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Stupid
+old nonsense!&nbsp; There are other more or less obscure indications
+of Jonson&rsquo;s spite, during the stage-quarrel, against Shakespeare,
+but the most unmistakable proof lies in his verses in &ldquo;Poet-Ape.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I am aware that Ben&rsquo;s intention here to hit at Shakespeare has
+been denied, for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of language.&nbsp;
+But though I would fain agree with him, the object of attack can be
+no known person save Will.&nbsp; Jonson was already, in <i>The Poetaster</i>,<i>
+</i>using the term &ldquo;<i>Poet-Ape</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>for he calls
+the actors at large &ldquo;apes.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in the Epigrams
+of his first Folio (1616).&nbsp; By that date, the year of Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+death, if he really loved Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose,
+Ben might have suppressed the verses.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Like Moli&egrave;re, Shakespeare had outlived the charge
+of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben.<br>
+<br>
+Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright &ldquo;<i>that would be thought our
+chief</i>&rdquo; - words which, by 1601, could only apply to Shakespeare;
+there was no rival, save Ben, near his throne.&nbsp; The playwright-actor,
+too, has now confessedly<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;grown<br>
+To a little wealth and credit in the scene,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+of no other actor-playwright could this be said.<br>
+<br>
+He is the author of &ldquo;works&rdquo; (Jonson was laughed at for calling
+his own plays &ldquo;works&rdquo;), but these works are &ldquo;the frippery
+of wit,&rdquo; that is, a tissue of plagiarisms, as in the case of <i>Pantalabus</i>.&nbsp;
+But &ldquo;told of this he slights it,&rdquo; as most successful authors,
+when accused, as they often are, of plagiarism by jealous rivals, wisely
+do; - so did Moli&egrave;re.&nbsp; This Poet-Ape began his career by
+&ldquo;picking and gleaning&rdquo; and &ldquo;buying reversions of old
+plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; This means that Shakespeare <i>did </i>work over
+earlier plays which his company had acquired; or, if Shakespeare did
+not, - then, I presume, - Bacon did!<br>
+<br>
+<i>That</i>,<i> </i>with much bad humour, is the gist of the rhymes
+on Poet-Ape.&nbsp; Ben thinks Shakespeare&rsquo;s &ldquo;works&rdquo;
+very larcenous, but still, the &ldquo;works,&rdquo; as such, are those
+of the poet-actor.&nbsp; I hope it is now clear that Poet-Ape, who,
+like <i>Pantalabus</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;takes up all&rdquo;; who has &ldquo;grown
+to a little wealth and credit in the scene,&rdquo; and who &ldquo;thinks
+himself the chief&rdquo; of contemporary dramatists, can be nobody but
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; Hence it follows that the &ldquo;works&rdquo; of
+Poet-Ape, are the works of Shakespeare.&nbsp; Ben admits, nay, asserts
+the existence of the works, says that they may reach &ldquo;the after-time,&rdquo;
+but he calls them a mass of plagiarisms, - because he is in a jealous
+rage.<br>
+<br>
+But this view does not at all suit Mr. Greenwood, for it shows Ben regarding
+Shakespeare as the &ldquo;Ape,&rdquo; or Actor, and also as the &ldquo;Poet&rdquo;
+and author of the &ldquo;works.&rdquo;&nbsp; Yet Ben&rsquo;s words mean
+nothing if not that an actor is the author of works which Ben accuses
+of plagiarism.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood thinks that the epigram proves merely
+that &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;The work which goes in his
+name is, in truth, the work of somebody else.&rdquo; <a name="citation244a"></a><a href="#footnote244a">{244a}</a>&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood put the same interpretation on Greene&rsquo;s words about
+&ldquo;Shakescene,&rdquo; and we showed that the interpretation was
+impossible.&nbsp; &ldquo;The utmost we should be entitled to say&rdquo;
+(if Shake-scene be meant for Shakspere) &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation245a"></a><a href="#footnote245a">{245a}</a>&nbsp;
+We proved, by quoting Greene&rsquo;s words, that he said nothing which
+could be tortured into this sense. <a name="citation245b"></a><a href="#footnote245b">{245b}</a>&nbsp;
+In the same way Ben&rsquo;s words cannot be tortured into the sense
+that &ldquo;the work which goes in his&rdquo; (Poet-Ape&rsquo;s) &ldquo;name
+is, in truth, the work of somebody else.&rdquo; <a name="citation245c"></a><a href="#footnote245c">{245c}</a>&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood tries to find the Anti-Willian hypothesis in Greene&rsquo;s
+<i>Groatsworth of Wit </i>and in Ben&rsquo;s epigram.&nbsp; It is in
+neither.<br>
+<br>
+Jonson is not accusing Shakespeare of pretending to be the author of
+plays written by somebody else, but of &ldquo;making <i>each man</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+</i>wit his own,&rdquo; and the <i>men </i>are the other dramatists
+of the day.&nbsp; Thus the future &ldquo;may judge&rdquo; Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+work &ldquo;to be his as well as <i>ours.</i>&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It is &ldquo;we,&rdquo; the living and recognised dramatists, whom Shakespeare
+is said to plagiarise from; so boldly that<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>We</i>,<i> the robbed</i>,<i> </i>leave rage, and pity it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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 &ldquo;us, the robbed.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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(&amp;c.).&nbsp; 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; &ldquo;after times may judge
+them to be his,&rdquo; as after times do to this hour.<br>
+<br>
+Thus Ben expresses, in accordance with his humour on each occasion,
+most discrepant opinions of Will&rsquo;s works, but he never varies
+from his identification of Will with the author of the plays.<br>
+<br>
+The &ldquo;works&rdquo; of which Ben wrote so splenetically in <i>Poet-Ape</i>,<i>
+</i>were the works of a Playwright-Actor, who could be nobody but the
+actor Shakespeare, as far as Ben then knew.&nbsp; If later, and in altered
+circumstances, he wrote of the very same works in very different terms,
+his &ldquo;utterances&rdquo; are &ldquo;not easily reconcilable&rdquo;
+with each other, - <i>whoever </i>the real author of the works may be.&nbsp;
+If Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s anonymous equivalent for Bacon, were
+the author, and if Ben came to know it, his attitudes towards the <i>works
+</i>are still as irreconcilable as ever.<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps Baconians and Mr. Greenwood might say, &ldquo;as long as Ben
+believed that the works were those of an Actor-Playwright, he thought
+them execrable.&nbsp; But when he learned that they were the works of
+Bacon (or of some Great One), he declared them to be more than excellent&rdquo;
+- <i>but not to Drummond</i>.&nbsp; I am reluctant to think that Jonson
+was the falsest and meanest of snobs.&nbsp; 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?),<i> </i>in prose, and in cold blood.&nbsp; I am only taking
+Ben as I find him and as I understand him.&nbsp; Every step in my argument
+rests on well-known facts.&nbsp; Ben notoriously, in his many panegyric
+verses, wrote in a style of inflated praise.&nbsp; In conversation with
+Drummond he censured, in brief blunt phrases, the men whom, in verse,
+he had extolled.&nbsp; The Baconian who has not read all Ben&rsquo;s
+panegyrics in verse, and the whole of his conversations with Drummond,
+argues in ignorance.<br>
+<br>
+We now come to Ben&rsquo;s panegyrics in the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; Ben
+heads the lines,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED<br>
+THE AUTHOR<br>
+MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE<br>
+AND<br>
+WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Words cannot be more explicit.&nbsp; Bacon was alive (I do not know
+when Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s hidden genius died), and Ben goes on to speak
+of the Author, Shakespeare, as dead, and buried.&nbsp; He calls on him
+thus:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Soul of the Age!<br>
+The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!<br>
+My Shakespear rise: I will not lodge thee by<br>
+Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie<br>
+A little further, to make thee a room:<br>
+Thou art a monument, without a tomb,<br>
+And art alive still, while thy book doth live,<br>
+And we have wits to read, and praise to give.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp;
+In the panegyric follow the lines:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,<br>
+From thence to honour thee I would not seek<br>
+For names, but call forth thund&rsquo;ring &AElig;schylus,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+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 &ldquo;did from their ashes come.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonson means, &ldquo;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&rdquo;?<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood and the Baconians believe that the author of the plays
+abounded in Latin and Greek.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+So far, Ben&rsquo;s verses have brought not a hint to suggest that he
+does not identify the actor, his Beloved, with the author.&nbsp; Nothing
+is gained when Ben, in commendatory verses, praises &ldquo;Thy Art,&rdquo;
+whereas, speaking to Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), he said that Shakespeare
+&ldquo;wanted art.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben is not now growling to Drummond
+of Hawthornden: he is writing a panegyric, and applauds Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;well-turned and true-filed lines,&rdquo; adding that, &ldquo;to
+write a living line&rdquo; a man &ldquo;must sweat,&rdquo; and &ldquo;strike
+the second heat upon the Muses&rsquo; anvil.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+To produce such lines requires labour, requires conscious &ldquo;art.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So Shakespeare <i>had </i>&ldquo;art,&rdquo; after all, despite what
+Ben had said to Drummond: &ldquo;Shakespeare lacked art.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There is no more in the matter; the &ldquo;inconsistency&rdquo; is that
+of Ben&rsquo;s humours on two perfectly different occasions, now grumbling
+to Drummond; and now writing hyperbolically in commendatory verses.&nbsp;
+But the contrast makes Mr. Greenwood exclaim, &ldquo;Can anything be
+more astonishing and at the same time more unsatisfactory than this?&rdquo;
+<a name="citation249a"></a><a href="#footnote249a">{249a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Can anything be more like Ben Jonson?<br>
+<br>
+Did he know the secret of the authorship in 1619?&nbsp; If so, why did
+he say nothing about the plays of the Great Unknown (whom he called
+Shakespeare), save what Drummond reports, &ldquo;want of art,&rdquo;
+ignorance of Bohemian geography.&nbsp; Or did Ben <i>not </i>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?&nbsp; If so, Ben was as absolutely inconsistent, as before.&nbsp;
+There is no way out of this dilemma.&nbsp; On neither choice are Ben&rsquo;s
+utterances &ldquo;easy to reconcile one with the other,&rdquo; except
+on the ground that Ben was - Ben, and his comments varied with his varying
+humours and occasions.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He was warmed with the
+heat of poetic composition and wound up to heights of eulogy, though
+even <i>now </i>he could not forget the small Latin and less Greek!<br>
+<br>
+We now turn to Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s views about the commendatory verses.&nbsp;
+On mature consideration I say nothing of his remarks on Ben&rsquo;s
+couplets about the bad engraved portrait. <a name="citation250a"></a><a href="#footnote250a">{250a}</a>&nbsp;
+They are concerned with the supposed &ldquo;<i>original </i>bust,&rdquo;
+as represented in Dugdale&rsquo;s engraving of 1656.&nbsp; What the
+Baconians hope to make out of &ldquo;the <i>original </i>bust&rdquo;
+I am quite unable to understand. <a name="citation250b"></a><a href="#footnote250b">{250b}</a>&nbsp;
+Again, I leave untouched some witticisms <a name="citation250c"></a><a href="#footnote250c">{250c}</a>
+on Jonson&rsquo;s lines about Spenser, Chaucer, and Beaumont in their
+tombs - lines either suggested by, or suggestive of others by an uncertain
+W. Basse, &ldquo;but the evidence of authorship seems somewhat doubtful.&nbsp;
+How the date is determined I do not know . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation251a"></a><a href="#footnote251a">{251a}</a>&nbsp;
+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&rsquo;s
+evidence, I glance and pass by.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Then follow these memorable words, which I have already discussed:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek . . .
+&rsquo;&rdquo; <a name="citation251b"></a><a href="#footnote251b">{251b}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In &ldquo;these memorable words,&rdquo; every non-Baconian sees Ben&rsquo;s
+opinion about his friend&rsquo;s lack of scholarship.&nbsp; According
+to his own excellent Index, Mr. Greenwood has already adverted often
+to &ldquo;these memorable words.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+(1)&nbsp; P. 40.&nbsp; &ldquo; . . . 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&rsquo;s other utterances as
+published in the Folio of 1623.&nbsp; But I shall have more to say as
+to that further on.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+(2)&nbsp; P. 88.&nbsp; Nothing of importance.<br>
+<br>
+(3)&nbsp; P. 220.&nbsp; Quotation from Dr. Johnson.&nbsp; Ben, &ldquo;who
+had no imaginable temptation to falsehood,&rdquo; wrote the memorable
+words.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood has to imagine a &ldquo;temptation to
+falsehood,&rdquo; - and he does.<br>
+<br>
+(4)&nbsp; P. 222.&nbsp; &ldquo;And we have recognised that Jonson&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;small Latin and less Greek&rsquo; must be explained away&rdquo;
+(a quotation from somebody).<br>
+<br>
+(5)&nbsp; P. 225.&nbsp; Allusion to anecdote of &ldquo;Latin (latten)
+spoons.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+(6)&nbsp; Pp. 382, 383.&nbsp; &ldquo;Some of us&rdquo; (some of whom?)
+&ldquo;have long looked upon it as axiomatic . . . that Jonson&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;small Latin and less Greek,&rsquo; if meant to be taken seriously,
+can only be applicable to Shakspere of Stratford and not to Shakespeare,&rdquo;
+that is, not to the Unknown author.&nbsp; Unluckily Ben, in 1623, is
+addressing the shade of the &ldquo;sweet Swan of Avon,&rdquo; meaning
+Stratford-on-Avon.<br>
+<br>
+(7)&nbsp; The next references in the laudable Index are to pp. 474,
+475.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then follow these memorable words, which I have already
+discussed:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+words which those who see how singularly inappropriate they are to the
+author of the <i>Plays </i>and <i>Poems </i>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.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>I </i>do not want to &ldquo;explain&rdquo; Ben&rsquo;s words &ldquo;away&rdquo;:
+I want to know how on earth Mr. Greenwood explains them away.&nbsp;
+My view is that Ben meant what he said, that Will, whose shade he is
+addressing, was no scholar (which he assuredly was not).&nbsp; I diligently
+search Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s scriptures, asking How does he explain
+Ben&rsquo;s &ldquo;memorable words&rdquo; away?&nbsp; On p. 106 of <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated </i>I seem to catch a glimmer of his method.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Once let the Stratfordians&rdquo; (every human and non-Baconian
+person of education) &ldquo;admit that Jonson when he penned the words
+&lsquo;small Latin and less Greek&rsquo; was really writing &lsquo;with
+his tongue in his cheek.&rsquo; . . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Once admit that vulgarism concerning a great English poet engaged on
+a poem of Pindaric flight, and of prophetic vision!&nbsp; No, we leave
+the admission to Mr. Greenwood and his allies.<br>
+<br>
+To consider thus is to consider too seriously.&nbsp; 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 &ldquo;admit&rdquo; that
+Ben wrote his verses &ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Elsewhere, <a name="citation253a"></a><a href="#footnote253a">{253a}</a>
+in place of Ben&rsquo;s &ldquo;tongue in his cheek,&rdquo; Mr. Greenwood
+prefers to suggest that Ben &ldquo;is here indulging in a little Socratic
+irony.&rdquo;&nbsp; Socrates &ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek&rdquo;!&nbsp;
+Say &ldquo;talking through his throat,&rdquo; if one may accept the
+evidence of the author of <i>Raffles</i>,<i> </i>as to the idioms of
+burglars.<br>
+<br>
+To return to criticism, we are to admit that Jonson was really writing
+&ldquo;with his tongue in his cheek,&rdquo; knowing that, as a fact,
+&ldquo;<i>Shakespeare</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>(the Great Unknown, the Bacon
+of the Baconians) &ldquo;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.&rdquo; <a name="citation254a"></a><a href="#footnote254a">{254a}</a><br>
+<br>
+So this is Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s method of &ldquo;explaining away&rdquo;
+the memorable words.&nbsp; He seems to conjecture that Will was not
+<i>Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>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 &ldquo;<i>nom de plume</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>of
+&ldquo;William Shakespeare&rdquo;; that the address to the &ldquo;Swan
+of Avon&rdquo; is a mere blind; and that Ben only alludes to his &ldquo;Beloved,&rdquo;
+the Stratford actor, when he tells his Beloved that his Beloved has
+&ldquo;small Latin and less Greek.&rdquo;&nbsp; All the praise is for
+Bacon, or the Great Unknown (Mr. Harris), the jeer is for &ldquo;his
+Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, And what he hath left
+Us.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+As far as I presume to understand this theory of the &ldquo;tongue in
+the cheek,&rdquo; of the &ldquo;Socratic irony,&rdquo; this is what
+Mr. Greenwood has to propose towards &ldquo;explaining away&rdquo; the
+evidence of Ben Jonson, in his famous commendatory verses.&nbsp; When
+we can see through the dust of words we find that the &ldquo;esoteric
+interpretation&rdquo; 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.&nbsp; Therefore when Ben explicitly
+states that his Beloved, Mr. Shakespeare of Stratford, the Swan of Avon
+<i>did </i>write the plays, and had small Latin and less Greek, Ben
+meant that he did <i>not </i>write them, that they were written by somebody
+else who had plenty of Greek and Latin.&nbsp; It is a strange logical
+method!&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood merely reasserts his paradox, and proves
+it, like certain Biblical critics of more orthodoxy than sense, by aid
+of his private &ldquo;esoteric method of interpretation.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben died in 1637; his MS. collection of notes and
+brief essays, and reflections, was published in 1641.&nbsp; Bacon, of
+whom he wrote his impressions in this manuscript, had died in 1626.&nbsp;
+Ben was no longer young: he says, among these notes, that his memory,
+once unusually strong, after he was past forty &ldquo;is much decayed
+in me . . .&nbsp; It was wont to be faithful to me, but shaken with
+age now . . . (I copy the extract as given by Mr. Greenwood. <a name="citation255a"></a><a href="#footnote255a">{255a}</a>)&nbsp;
+He spoke sooth: he attributes to Orpheus, in &ldquo;Timber,&rdquo; a
+line from Homer, and quotes from Homer what is not in that poet&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;works.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+In this manuscript occurs, then, a brief prose note, headed, <i>De Shakespeare
+nostrati</i>,<i> </i>on our countryman Shakespeare.&nbsp; It is an anecdote
+of the Players and their ignorance, with a few critical and personal
+remarks on Shakespeare.&nbsp; &ldquo;I remember the players have often
+mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that (whatsoever he penned)
+he never blotted out a line.&nbsp; My answer hath been, &lsquo;Would
+he had blotted a thousand,&rsquo; which they thought a malevolent speech.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Sufflaminandus
+erat</i>,&rsquo;<i> </i>as Augustus said of Haterius.&nbsp; His wit
+was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too!&nbsp; Many
+times he fell into those things could not escape laughter, as when he
+said in the person of C&aelig;sar, one speaking to him, &lsquo;Caesar,
+thou dost me wrong.&rsquo;&nbsp; He replied, &lsquo;C&aelig;sar did
+never wrong but with just cause&rsquo;; and such like, which were ridiculous.&nbsp;
+But he redeemed his vices with his virtues.&nbsp; There was ever more
+in him to be praised than to be pardoned.&rdquo;&nbsp; Baconians actually
+maintain that Ben is here speaking of Bacon.<br>
+<br>
+Of whom is Ben writing?&nbsp; Of the author of <i>Julius C&aelig;sar</i>,
+- certainly, from which, his memory failing, he misquotes a line.&nbsp;
+If Ben be in the great secret - that the author was Bacon, or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Meanwhile the person of whom he speaks
+<i>is here the actor-author</i>,<i> </i>whom the players, his friends,
+commended &ldquo;wherein he faulted,&rdquo; namely, in not &ldquo;blotting&rdquo;
+where, in a thousand cases, Ben wishes that he <i>had </i>blotted.&nbsp;
+Can the most enthusiastic Baconian believe that when Ben wrote about
+the players&rsquo; ignorant applause of Shakespeare&rsquo;s, of their
+friend&rsquo;s lack of care in correction, Ben had Bacon in his mind?<br>
+<br>
+As for Mr. Greenwood, he says that in Ben&rsquo;s sentence about the
+players and their ignorant commendation, &ldquo;we have it on Jonson&rsquo;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.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+We have it, and how is the critic to get over or round the fact?&nbsp;
+Thus, &ldquo;We know that this statement&rdquo; (about the almost blotless
+lines) &ldquo;is ridiculous; that if the players had any unblotted manuscripts
+in their hands (which is by no means probable) they were merely fair
+copies . . . &rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps, but the Baconians appear to assume that a &ldquo;fair copy&rdquo;
+is not, and cannot be, a copy in the handwriting of the author.<br>
+<br>
+As I have said before, the Players knew Will&rsquo;s handwriting, if
+he could write.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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, &ldquo;on Jonson&rsquo;s testimony&rdquo; in his authorship.<br>
+<br>
+To finish Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s observations, &ldquo;if they&rdquo;
+(the players) &ldquo;really thought that the author of the plays wrote
+them off <i>currente calamo</i>,<i> </i>and never&rdquo; (or &ldquo;hardly
+ever&rdquo;) &ldquo;blotted a line, never revised, never made any alterations,
+they knew nothing whatever concerning the real Shakespeare.&rdquo; <a name="citation258a"></a><a href="#footnote258a">{258a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Nothing whatever?&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He and I were looking
+at some of Dickens&rsquo;s MSS.&nbsp; They were full of erasions and
+corrections.&nbsp; I said, &ldquo;How unlike Scott!&rdquo; whose first
+draft of his novels exactly answered to the players&rsquo; description
+of Will&rsquo;s &ldquo;copy.&rdquo;&nbsp; My friend said, &ldquo;Browning
+scarcely made an erasion or change in writing his poems,&rdquo; and
+referred to Mr. Browning&rsquo;s MSS. for the press, of which examples
+were lying near us.&nbsp; &ldquo;But Browning must have made clean copies
+for the press,&rdquo; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The Players&rsquo; testimony, through Jonson, cannot be destroyed by
+the &ldquo;easy stratagem&rdquo; of Mr. Greenwood.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he constantly professes
+that he &ldquo;is not the advocate of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The author was some great man, as like Bacon as one pea to another.&nbsp;
+Mr. Greenwood says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio
+<a name="citation259a"></a><a href="#footnote259a">{259a}</a> &ldquo;as
+a very special occasion.&rdquo;&nbsp; Well, it <i>was </i>a very special
+occasion; no literary occasion could be more &ldquo;special.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Without the Folio, badly as it is executed, we should perhaps never
+have had many of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays.&nbsp; The occasion was special
+in the highest degree.<br>
+<br>
+But, says Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;if we could only get to the back of
+Jonson&rsquo;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.&rdquo; <a name="citation260a"></a><a href="#footnote260a">{260a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Ben was much in the habit of giving &ldquo;sendoffs&rdquo; of great
+eloquence to poetic &ldquo;ventures&rdquo; now forgotten.&nbsp; What
+could &ldquo;the efficient cause&rdquo; be in the case of the Folio?&nbsp;
+At once Mr. Greenwood has recourse to Bacon; he cannot, do what he will,
+keep Bacon &ldquo;out of the Memorial.&rdquo;&nbsp; Ben was with Bacon
+at Gorhambury, on Bacon&rsquo;s sixtieth birthday (January 22, 1621).&nbsp;
+Ben wrote verses about the Genius of the old house,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Thou stand&rsquo;st as if some mystery thou didst.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;What was that &lsquo;mystery&rsquo;?&rdquo; asks Mr. Greenwood.
+<a name="citation260b"></a><a href="#footnote260b">{260b}</a>&nbsp;
+What indeed?&nbsp; And what has all this to do with Ben&rsquo;s commendatory
+verses for the Folio, two years later?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood also surmises,
+as we have seen, <a name="citation260c"></a><a href="#footnote260c">{260c}</a>
+that Jonson was with Bacon, helping to translate <i>The Advancement
+of Learning </i>in June, 1623.<br>
+<br>
+Let us suppose that he was: what has that to do with Ben&rsquo;s verses
+for the Folio?&nbsp; Does Mr. Greenwood mean to hint that <i>Bacon </i>was
+the &ldquo;efficient cause operating to induce&rdquo; Ben &ldquo;to
+give the best possible send-off&rdquo; to the Folio?&nbsp; One does
+not see what interest Bacon had in stimulating the enthusiasm of Ben,
+unless we accept Bacon as author of the plays, which Mr. Greenwood does
+not.&nbsp; If Mr. Greenwood thinks that Bacon was the author of the
+plays, then the facts are suitable to his belief.&nbsp; But if he does
+not, - &ldquo;I hold no brief for the Baconians,&rdquo; he says, - how
+is all this passage on Ben&rsquo;s visits to Bacon concerned with the
+subject in hand?<br>
+<br>
+Between the passage on some &ldquo;efficient cause&rdquo; &ldquo;at
+the back of Ben&rsquo;s mind,&rdquo; <a name="citation261a"></a><a href="#footnote261a">{261a}</a>
+and the passage on Ben&rsquo;s visits to Bacon in 1621-3, <a name="citation261b"></a><a href="#footnote261b">{261b}</a>
+six pages intervene, and blur the supposed connection between the &ldquo;efficient
+cause&rdquo; of Ben&rsquo;s verses of 1623, and his visits to Bacon
+in 1621-3.&nbsp; These intercalary pages are concerned with Ben&rsquo;s
+laudations of Bacon, by name, in his <i>Discoveries</i>.&nbsp; The first
+is entirely confined to praise of Bacon as an orator.&nbsp; Bacon is
+next mentioned in a Catalogue of Writers as &ldquo;<i>he who hath filled
+up all numbers</i>,<i> </i>and performed that in our tongue which may
+be preferred or compared either to <i>insolent Greece or haughty Rome</i>,&rdquo;<i>
+</i>words used of Shakespeare by Jonson in the Folio verses.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood remarks that Jonson&rsquo;s Catalogue, to judge by the
+names he cites (More, Chaloner, Smith, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sidney, Hooker,
+Essex, Raleigh, Savile, Sandys, and so on), suggests that &ldquo;he
+is thinking mainly of wits and orators of his own and the preceding
+generation,&rdquo; not of poets specially.&nbsp; This is obvious; why
+should Ben name Shakespeare with More, Smith, Chaloner, Eliot, Bishop
+Gardiner, Egerton, Sandys, and Savile?&nbsp; Yet &ldquo;it is remarkable
+that no mention should be made of the great dramatist.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Where is Spenser named, or Beaumont, or Chaucer, with whom Ben ranked
+Shakespeare?&nbsp; Ben quoted of Bacon the line he wrote long before
+of Shakespeare as a poet, about &ldquo;insolent Greece,&rdquo; and all
+this is &ldquo;remarkable,&rdquo; and Mr. Greenwood finds it &ldquo;not
+surprising&rdquo; <a name="citation262a"></a><a href="#footnote262a">{262a}</a>
+that the Baconians dwell on the &ldquo;extraordinary coincidence of
+expression,&rdquo; as if Ben were incapable of repeating a happy phrase
+from himself, and as if we should wonder at anything the Baconians may
+say or do.<br>
+<br>
+Another startling coincidence is that, in <i>Discoveries</i>,<i> </i>Ben
+said of Shakespeare &ldquo;his wit was in his own power,&rdquo; and
+wished that &ldquo;the rule of it had been so too.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of Bacon,
+Ben wrote, &ldquo;his language, where he could spare or pass by a jest,
+was nobly censorious.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus Bacon <i>had </i>&ldquo;the
+rule of his own wit,&rdquo; Bacon &ldquo;<i>could </i>spare or pass
+by a jest,&rdquo; whereas Shakespeare apparently could not - so like
+were the two Dromios in this particular!&nbsp; Strong in these convincing
+arguments, the Baconians ask (not so Mr. Greenwood, he is no Baconian),
+&ldquo;were there then <i>two </i>writers of whom this description was
+appropriate . . . Was there only one, and was it of Bacon, under the
+name of &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; that Ben wrote <i>De Shakespeare
+nostrati</i>?<br>
+<br>
+Read it again, substituting &ldquo;Bacon&rdquo; for &ldquo;Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I remember the players,&rdquo; and so on, and what has Bacon
+to do here?&nbsp; &ldquo;Sometimes it was necessary that <i>Bacon </i>should
+be stopped.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Many times <i>Bacon </i>fell into those
+things could not escape laughter,&rdquo; such as C&aelig;sar&rsquo;s
+supposed line, &ldquo;and such like, which were ridiculous.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;<i>Bacon </i>redeemed his vices with his virtues.&nbsp; There
+was ever more in <i>Bacon </i>to be praised than to be pardoned.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Thus freely, according to the Baconians, speaks Ben of Bacon, whom he
+here styles &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; - Heaven knows why! while crediting
+him with the players as his friends.&nbsp; Ben could not think or speak
+thus of Bacon.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood occupies his space with these sagacities
+of the Baconians; one marvels why he takes the trouble.&nbsp; We are
+asked why Ben wrote so little and that so cool (&ldquo;I loved him on
+this side idolatry as much as any&rdquo;) about Shakespeare.&nbsp; Read
+through Ben&rsquo;s <i>Discoveries: </i>what has he to say about any
+one of his great contemporary dramatists, from Marlowe to Beaumont?&nbsp;
+He says nothing about any of them; though he had panegyrised them, as
+he panegyrised Beaumont, in verse.&nbsp; In his prose <i>Discoveries
+</i>he speaks, among English dramatists, of Shakespeare alone.<br>
+<br>
+We are also asked by the Baconians to believe that his remarks on Bacon
+under the name of Shakespeare are really an addition to his more copious
+and infinitely more reverential observations on Bacon, named by his
+own name; &ldquo;I have and do reverence him for the greatness that
+was only proper to himself.&rdquo;&nbsp; Also (where Bacon is spoken
+of as Shakespeare) &ldquo;He redeemed his vices by his virtues.&nbsp;
+There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned . . . Sometimes
+it was necessary that he should be stopped . . . Many times he fell
+into those things that could not escape laughter.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+These two views of Bacon are, if you like, incongruous.&nbsp; The person
+spoken of is in both cases Bacon, say the Baconians, and Mr. Greenwood
+sympathetically alludes to their ideas, <a name="citation264a"></a><a href="#footnote264a">{264a}</a>
+which I cannot qualify in courteous terms.&nbsp; Baconians &ldquo;would,
+of course, explain the difficulty by saying that however sphinx-like
+were Jonson&rsquo;s utterances, he had clearly distinct in his own mind
+two different personages, viz. Shakspere the player, and Shakespeare
+the real author of the plays and poems, and that if in the perplexing
+passage quoted from the <i>Discoveries </i>he appears to confound one
+with the other, it is because the solemn seal of secrecy had been imposed
+on him.&rdquo;&nbsp; They <i>would </i>say, they <i>do </i>say all that.&nbsp;
+Ben is not to let out that Bacon is the author.&nbsp; So he tells us
+of Bacon that he often made himself ridiculous, and so forth, - but
+he <i>pretends </i>that he is speaking of Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+All this wedge of wisdom, remember, is inserted between the search for
+&ldquo;the efficient cause&rdquo; of Ben&rsquo;s panegyric (1623), in
+the Folio, on his Beloved Mr. William Shakespeare, and the discovery
+of Ben&rsquo;s visits to Bacon in 1621-3.<br>
+<br>
+Does Mr. Greenwood mean that Ben, in 1623 (or earlier), knew the secret
+of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship, and, stimulated by his hospitality, applauded
+his works in the Folio, while, as he must not disclose the secret, he
+throughout speaks of Bacon as Shakespeare, puns on that name in the
+line about seeming &ldquo;to shake a lance,&rdquo; and salutes the Lord
+of Gorhambury as &ldquo;Sweet Swan of Avon&rdquo;?&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood
+cannot mean that; for he is not a Baconian.&nbsp; What <i>does </i>he
+mean?<br>
+<br>
+Put together his pages 483, 489-491.&nbsp; On the former we find how
+&ldquo;it would appear&rdquo; that Jonson thought the issue of the Folio
+(1623) &ldquo;a very special occasion,&rdquo; and that perhaps if we
+could only &ldquo;get to the back of his 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.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then skip to pp. 489-491,
+and you find very special occasions: Bacon&rsquo;s birthday feast with
+its&rdquo; mystery&rdquo;; Ben as one of Bacon&rsquo;s &ldquo;good pens,&rdquo;
+in 1623.&nbsp; &ldquo;The best of these good pens, it seems, was Jonson.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation266a"></a><a href="#footnote266a">{266a}</a>&nbsp;
+On what evidence does it &ldquo;seem&rdquo;?&nbsp; The opinion of Judge
+Webb.<br>
+<br>
+Is this supposed collaboration with Bacon in 1623, &ldquo;the efficient
+cause operating to induce&rdquo; Ben &ldquo;to give the best possible
+send-off&rdquo; to the Folio?&nbsp; How could this be the &ldquo;efficient
+cause&rdquo; if Bacon were not the author of the plays?<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, like the Genius at the birthday supper,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Stands as if some mystery he did.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On a trifling point of honour, namely, as to whether Ben were a man
+likely to lie, tortuously, hypocritically, to be elaborately false about
+the authorship of the Shakespearean plays, it is hopelessly impossible
+to bring the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood (who &ldquo;holds no brief
+for the Baconians&rdquo;) to my point of view.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood rides
+off thus - what the Baconians do is unimportant.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are justifiable,
+some that it is actually a duty to tell.&rdquo;&nbsp; It may be so;
+I pray that I may never tell any of them (or any more of them).<br>
+<br>
+Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever he plumply
+denied that he wrote the <i>Waverley </i>novels.&nbsp; I do not judge
+Sir Walter.&nbsp; Heaven forbid!&nbsp; But if, in Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+words, he, &ldquo;we are told, thought it perfectly justifiable for
+a writer who wished to preserve his anonymity, to deny, when questioned,
+the authorship of a work, since the interrogator had no right to put
+such a question to him,&rdquo; <a name="citation267a"></a><a href="#footnote267a">{267a}</a>
+I disagree with Sir Walter.&nbsp; Many other measures, in accordance
+with the conditions of each case, were open to him.&nbsp; Some are formulated
+by his own Bucklaw, in <i>The Bride of Lammermoor</i>,<i> </i>as regards
+questions about what occurred on his bridal night.&nbsp; Bucklaw would
+challenge the man, and cut the lady, who asked questions.&nbsp; But
+Scott&rsquo;s case, as cited, applies only to Bacon (or Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s
+Unknown), if <i>he </i>were asked whether or not he were the author
+of the plays.&nbsp; No idiot, at that date, was likely to put the question!&nbsp;
+But, if anyone did ask, Bacon must either evade, or deny, or tell the
+truth.<br>
+<br>
+On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or tell the
+truth.&nbsp; But the parallel of Scott is not applicable to any other
+person except to the author who wishes to preserve his anonymity, and
+is questioned.&nbsp; The parallel does not apply to Ben.&nbsp; <i>He
+</i>had not written the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; Nobody was asking
+<i>him </i>if he had written them.&nbsp; If he knew that the author
+was Bacon, and knew it under pledge of secrecy, and was asked (<i>per
+impossibile</i>)<i> </i>&ldquo;Who wrote these plays?&rdquo; he had
+only to say, &ldquo;Look at the title-page.&rdquo;&nbsp; But no mortal
+was asking Ben the question.&nbsp; But we are to suppose that, in the
+panegyric and in <i>Discoveries</i>,<i> </i>Ben chooses to assert, first,
+that Shakespeare was his Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon; and that he
+&ldquo;loved him, on this side idolatry, as much as any.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There is no evidence that he did love Shakespeare, except his own statement,
+when, according to the Baconians, he is really speaking of Bacon, and,
+according to Mr. Greenwood, of an unknown person, singularly like Bacon.&nbsp;
+Consequently, unless we can prove that Ben really loved the actor, he
+is telling a disgustingly hypocritical and wholly needless falsehood,
+both before and after the death of Bacon.&nbsp; To be silent about the
+authorship of a book, an authorship which is the secret of your friend
+and patron, is one thing and a blameless thing.&nbsp; All the friends,
+some twenty, to whom Scott confided the secret of his authorship were
+silent.&nbsp; But not one of them publicly averred that the author was
+their very dear friend, So-and-so, who was not Scott, and perhaps not
+their friend at all.&nbsp; That was Ben&rsquo;s line.&nbsp; Thus the
+parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood, twice, <a name="citation268a"></a><a href="#footnote268a">{268a}</a>
+is no parallel.&nbsp; It has no kind of analogy with Ben&rsquo;s alleged
+falsehoods, so elaborate, so incomprehensible except by Baconians, and,
+if he did not love the actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably hypocritical,
+and open to instant detection.<br>
+<br>
+It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which Ben is charged.&nbsp;
+But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of writing his novels, which,
+let us say, he signed &ldquo;James Hogg,&rdquo; and died without confessing
+his secret, and without taking his elaborate precautions for its preservation
+on record.<br>
+<br>
+Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott&rsquo;s secret, under vow of
+silence, and was determined to keep it at any cost.&nbsp; He therefore,
+writing after the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in Scott&rsquo;s lifetime,
+publishes verses declaring that Hogg was his &ldquo;beloved&rdquo; (an
+enormous fib), and that Hogg, &ldquo;Sweet Swan of Ettrick,&rdquo; was
+the author of the <i>Waverley </i>novels.<br>
+<br>
+To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott&rsquo;s death, leaves
+a note in prose to the effect that, while he loved Hogg on this side
+idolatry (again, a monstrous fable), he must confess that Hogg, author
+of the <i>Waverley </i>novels, often fell into things that were ridiculous;
+and often needed to have a stopper put on him for all these remarks.&nbsp;
+Lockhart, while speaking of Hogg, is thinking of Scott - and he makes
+the remarks solely to conceal Scott&rsquo;s authorship of the novels
+- of which, on the hypothesis, nobody suspected Scott to be the author.&nbsp;
+Lockhart must then have been what the Baconian Mr. Theobald calls Mr.
+Churton Collins, &ldquo;a measureless liar,&rdquo; - all for no reason.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no parallel,
+of Scott&rsquo;s denying his own authorship, goes on, &ldquo;for all
+we know, Jonson might have seen nothing in the least objectionable in
+the publication by some great personage of his dramatic works under
+a pseudonym&rdquo; (under another man&rsquo;s name really), &ldquo;even
+though that pseudonym led to a wrong conception as to the authorship;
+and that, if, being a friend of that great personage, and working in
+his service&rdquo; (Ben worked, by the theory, in Bacon&rsquo;s), &ldquo;he
+had solemnly engaged to preserve the secret inviolate, and not to reveal
+it even to posterity, then <i>doubtless </i>(&lsquo;I thank thee, Jew&rsquo;
+(meaning Sir Sidney Lee), &lsquo;for teaching me that word&rsquo;!)
+he would have remained true to that solemn pledge.&rdquo; <a name="citation270a"></a><a href="#footnote270a">{270a}</a><br>
+<br>
+To remain &ldquo;true,&rdquo; Ben had only to hold his peace.&nbsp;
+But he lied up and down, and right and left, and even declared that
+Bacon was a friend of the players, and needed to be shut up, and made
+himself a laughing-stock in his plays, - styling Bacon&rdquo; Shakespeare.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+All this, and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe
+before we can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines can
+we get rid of Ben Jonson&rsquo;s testimony to the authorship of Will
+Shakspere, Gent.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XIII: THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Let us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find
+nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal.&nbsp; Bacon was
+the author of the Shakespearean plays, they tell us.&nbsp; Let us look
+rapidly at his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic
+supremacy, and imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous, when
+we consider his occupations and his ruling passion?<br>
+<br>
+Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware of it,
+and had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to do.&nbsp;
+While still at Cambridge, and therefore before he was fifteen, he was
+utterly dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr. Rawley, with the scientific
+doctrines of the Schools.&nbsp; In the study of nature they reasoned
+from certain accepted ideas, <i>a priori </i>principles, not from what
+he came to call &ldquo;interrogation of Nature.&rdquo;&nbsp; There were,
+indeed, and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school
+doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing.&nbsp; As
+Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, &ldquo;If our study
+of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not
+a better method be found? . . .&nbsp; Upon the conviction &lsquo;This
+may be done,&rsquo; followed at once the question, <i>How </i>may it
+be done?&nbsp; Upon that question answered followed the resolution to
+try and do it.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon, &ldquo;the event
+which had a greater influence than any other upon his character and
+future course.&nbsp; From that moment he had a vocation which employed
+and stimulated him . . . an object to live for as wide as humanity,
+as immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough
+to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation274a"></a><a href="#footnote274a">{274a}</a>&nbsp;
+The vocation, the idea, the object, were not poetical.<br>
+<br>
+In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was much
+concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in France,
+and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good government
+of his native country.&nbsp; He could only aid that cause by the favour
+of Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament, where, despite
+his desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen.&nbsp;
+He was obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and polemical
+literature, as were set him by people in power.&nbsp; With these three
+great objects filling his heart, inspiring his ambition, and occupying
+his energies and time, we cannot easily believe, without direct external
+evidence, that he, or any mortal, could have leisure and detachment
+from his main objects (to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient
+to enable him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583),<i> </i>when, if ever, he might
+have penned sonnets to his mistress&rsquo;s eyebrow, he reports that
+he wrote &ldquo;his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which
+he called <i>Temporis Partus Maximus</i>,<i> </i>&lsquo;The Greatest
+Birth of Time,&rsquo;&rdquo; and &ldquo;we need not doubt that between
+Law and Philosophy he found enough to do.&rdquo; <a name="citation275a"></a><a href="#footnote275a">{275a}</a>&nbsp;
+For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer (of which
+I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man&rsquo;s
+hours.&nbsp; In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything
+very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long
+pamphlet, &ldquo;Touching the Controversies of the Church of England.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation275b"></a><a href="#footnote275b">{275b}</a>&nbsp;
+He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the
+stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof
+that he wrote <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>!<i>&nbsp;
+</i>By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never
+would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy.&nbsp;
+He was apparently hard at scientific work.&nbsp; &ldquo;I account my
+ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most
+parts of action are.&rdquo;&nbsp; He adds, &ldquo;The contemplative
+planet carries me away wholly,&rdquo; and by contemplation I conceive
+him to mean what he calls &ldquo;vast contemplative ends.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+These he proceeds to describe: he does <i>not </i>mean the writing of
+<i>Venus and Adonis </i>(1593), nor of <i>Lucrece </i>(1594), nor of
+comedies!&nbsp; &ldquo;I have taken all knowledge to be my province,&rdquo;
+and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the
+one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the
+other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures,
+hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious
+observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries
+. . . This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if
+one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it
+cannot be removed.&rdquo;&nbsp; If Cecil cannot help him to a post,
+if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras,
+to voluntary poverty, &ldquo; . . . and become some sorry bookmaker,
+or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . . &rdquo; <a name="citation276a"></a><a href="#footnote276a">{276a}</a>&nbsp;
+Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers,
+endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.<br>
+<br>
+Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley
+at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, &ldquo;my Lord Treasurer Burghley.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman&rsquo;s philanthropy, and
+&ldquo;vast speculative ends&rdquo; (how <i>modern </i>it all is!),<i>
+</i>and the rest of it?&nbsp; But just because Bacon, at thirty-one,
+<i>is </i>so extremely &ldquo;green,&rdquo; going to &ldquo;take all
+knowledge for his province (if some one will only subsidise him, and
+endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation
+of science.&nbsp; Surely no Baconian will deny it!&nbsp; Being so deeply
+in earnest, taking his &ldquo;study and meditation&rdquo; so hard, I
+cannot see him as the author of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>and
+whatever plays of the period, - say, <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i>,<i> Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part
+I, - are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians.&nbsp; Of
+course my view is merely personal or &ldquo;subjective.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The Baconians&rsquo; view is also &ldquo;subjective.&rdquo;&nbsp; I
+regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his
+vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in science,
+is what he <i>did</i>,<i> </i>as far as he was able.&nbsp; His other
+desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of
+affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.&nbsp;
+There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition
+in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other
+professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym
+of an ignorant actor.<br>
+<br>
+You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do.&nbsp; Argument
+is unavailing.&nbsp; I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive
+letter to Cecil.&nbsp; Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think,
+a vast <i>literary </i>aim.&nbsp; They must take his alternative - to
+be &ldquo;some sorry bookmaker, <i>or </i>a pioneer in that mine of
+truth,&rdquo; as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of
+a company of players, <i>or </i>the founder of a regenerating philosophy.&nbsp;
+But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called &ldquo;bookmakers,&rdquo;
+for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them from appearing
+as printed books.&nbsp; If Bacon by &ldquo;bookmaker&rdquo; meant &ldquo;playwright,&rdquo;
+he put a modest value on his poetical work!<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile (1591-2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful,
+and famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much excellent
+advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was not taken.&nbsp;
+It is not a novel suggestion, that Essex is the young man to whom Bacon
+is so passionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed
+to Shakespeare.&nbsp; &ldquo;I applied myself to him&rdquo; (that is,
+to Essex), says Bacon, &ldquo;in a manner which, I think, happeneth
+rarely among men.&rdquo;&nbsp; The poet of the Sonnets applies himself
+to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily) &ldquo;happeneth rarely
+among men.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon&rsquo;s life.&nbsp; But,
+if you pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find
+that he does not speak <i>openly </i>of a tenderly passionate attachment
+to that young man; not more than <i>this</i>,<i> </i>&ldquo;I did nothing
+but advise and ruminate with myself, to the best of my understanding,
+propositions and memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship&rsquo;s
+honour, fortune, or service.&rdquo; <a name="citation279a"></a><a href="#footnote279a">{279a}</a>&nbsp;
+As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591-2), he had no great leisure
+for writing poetry and plays.&nbsp; Moreover, speaking as a poet, in
+the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion
+to Essex into the symbolism of his passionate verse.&nbsp; <i>Was Essex
+then a married man</i>?<i>&nbsp; </i>If so, the Sonneteer&rsquo;s insistence
+on his marrying must be symbolical of - anything else you please.<br>
+<br>
+We know that Bacon, at this period, &ldquo;did nothing&rdquo; but &ldquo;ruminate&rdquo;
+about Essex.&nbsp; The words are his own! (1604).&nbsp; No plays, no
+<i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i> </i>nothing but enthusiastic service of
+Essex and the Sonnets.&nbsp; Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn
+some pageant of Essex (November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed
+such matter as &ldquo;Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge&rdquo; (containing
+his usual views about regenerating science), and &ldquo;Mr. Bacon&rsquo;s
+Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.&rdquo; <a name="citation279b"></a><a href="#footnote279b">{279b}</a>&nbsp;
+Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.<br>
+<br>
+He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson&rsquo;s
+(?)<i> </i>famous indictment of Elizabeth&rsquo;s Government, in <i>Observations
+on a Libel</i>. <a name="citation280a"></a><a href="#footnote280a">{280a}</a>&nbsp;
+What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was not solely devoted
+to <i>Venus and Adonis </i>and to furbishing-up old plays, though, no
+doubt, he <i>may </i>have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged
+his luscious imaginations in <i>Venus and Adonis</i>.&nbsp; I would
+not limit the potentialities of his genius.&nbsp; But, certainly, this
+amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention
+his severe &ldquo;study and meditation&rdquo; on science.<br>
+<br>
+All these activities of Bacon, in the year of <i>Venus and Adonis</i>,<i>
+</i>do not exhaust his exercises.&nbsp; Bacon, living laborious days,
+plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth&rsquo;s
+disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship,
+and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try
+to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex&rsquo;s affairs,
+to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit
+for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of &ldquo;Formularies
+and Elegancies&rdquo; (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for
+the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed
+Essex (1600-1), while always &ldquo;labouring in secret&rdquo; at that
+vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied
+him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from
+affairs of State. <a name="citation281a"></a><a href="#footnote281a">{281a}</a>&nbsp;
+Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most
+onerous.&nbsp; He was also writing <i>The Advancement of Learning </i>(1605).&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I do confess,&rdquo; he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, &ldquo;since
+I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from
+that I have done.&rdquo; <a name="citation281b"></a><a href="#footnote281b">{281b}</a>&nbsp;
+His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came between
+him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and
+his private schemes and suits.&nbsp; To this burden of Atlas the Baconians
+add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare&rsquo;s company, and
+the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets.&nbsp; Even without
+this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough,
+but with it - he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept
+him and his plot - to write plays under the pseudonym of &ldquo;William
+Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Talk of miracles as things which do not happen!&nbsp; The activities
+of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man&rsquo;s mind and
+heart, - especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute
+his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem,
+to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold,
+he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older.&nbsp;
+No wonder that he turned to tragedy, <i>Lear</i>,<i> Macbeth</i>,<i>
+Othello</i>,<i> </i>and saw life <i>en noir: </i>man delighted him not,
+nor woman either.<br>
+<br>
+The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon,
+do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility.&nbsp;
+But they make it an intellectual miracle.&nbsp; Perhaps I may be allowed
+to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere&rsquo;s
+knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. <a name="citation282a"></a><a href="#footnote282a">{282a}</a>&nbsp;
+I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip
+of his pen.&nbsp; Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon
+and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and
+his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only
+Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions.&nbsp; (But
+why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)<br>
+<br>
+By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not
+Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of
+the Folio. <a name="citation282b"></a><a href="#footnote282b">{282b}</a>&nbsp;
+&ldquo;If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays,
+he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the Folio,
+and the style of it&rdquo; (stuffed with terms of law) &ldquo;would
+be accounted for.&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote
+the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period,&rdquo;
+says Sir Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word &ldquo;all.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation283a"></a><a href="#footnote283a">{283a}</a>&nbsp;
+However he says, &ldquo;We must admit that this use of legal jargon
+is frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan
+period - in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. <a name="citation283b"></a><a href="#footnote283b">{283b}</a>&nbsp;
+The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style
+&ldquo;more natural,&rdquo; and more accurately than the rest.&nbsp;
+And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all,
+he would be sure to do it pretty well.<br>
+<br>
+For on this point of Will&rsquo;s use of legal phraseology I frankly
+profess myself entirely at a loss.&nbsp; To use it in poetry was part
+of the worse side of taste at that period.&nbsp; The lawyers with one
+voice declare that Will&rsquo;s use of it is copious and correct, and
+that their &ldquo;mystery&rdquo; is difficult, their jargon hard to
+master; &ldquo;there is nothing so dangerous,&rdquo; wrote Lord Campbell,
+&ldquo;as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I have not tampered with it.&nbsp; Perhaps a man of genius who found
+it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily than
+lawyers deem possible.&nbsp; But Will, so accurate in his legal terms,
+is so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural
+history, and in classic lore.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally
+at sea as a naturalist.&nbsp; On the habits of bees, for example, &ldquo;his
+natural history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.&rdquo;
+<a name="citation284a"></a><a href="#footnote284a">{284a}</a>&nbsp;
+Virgil, though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared
+with Will.&nbsp; About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed.&nbsp;
+His Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great medi&aelig;val
+storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of Pliny.&nbsp; &ldquo;He
+went to contemporary error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to
+nature,&rdquo; says a critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. <a name="citation284b"></a><a href="#footnote284b">{284b}</a>&nbsp;
+Was that worthy of Bacon?<br>
+<br>
+All these charges against <i>le vieux Williams </i>(as Th&eacute;ophile
+Gautier calls our Will) I admit.&nbsp; But Will was no Bacon; Will had
+not &ldquo;taken all knowledge for his province.&rdquo;&nbsp; Bacon,
+I hope, had not neglected Bees!&nbsp; Thus the problem, why is Will
+accurate in his legal terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity,
+in history, in classic matters, is not by me to be solved.&nbsp; I can
+only surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason,
+he had read law-books, or drawn information from Templars about the
+meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments
+against Will Shakespeare&rsquo;s authorship of the plays and poems.&nbsp;
+Their chief argument for Bacon is <i>aut Diabolus</i>,<i> aut Franciscus</i>,<i>
+</i>which, freely interpreted, means, &ldquo;If Bacon is not the author,
+who the devil is?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are
+attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them,
+namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years
+of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place
+in the world of the drama.&nbsp; His authorship is explicitly vouched
+for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests
+in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic,
+Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had
+been one of Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;hands,&rdquo; and lived into the
+Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within,
+and <i>his </i>&ldquo;mellifluous Shakespeare&rdquo; is &ldquo;Will,&rdquo;
+as his Beaumont was &ldquo;Frank,&rdquo; his Marlowe &ldquo;Kit,&rdquo;
+his Fletcher, &ldquo;Jack.&rdquo;&nbsp; The author of <i>Daiphantus
+</i>(1604), mentioning the popularity of <i>Hamlet</i>,<i> </i>styles
+it &ldquo;one of friendly Shakespeare&rsquo;s tragedies.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly
+character.&nbsp; The other authors of allusions did not need to say
+<i>who </i>their &ldquo;Shakespeare&rdquo; was, any more than they needed
+to say <i>who </i>Marlowe or any other poet was.&nbsp; We have examined
+the possibly unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention
+Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly
+that he is also the actor.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;But all may have been deceived&rdquo; by the long conspiracy
+of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One.&nbsp; To believe this possible,
+considering the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival
+playwrights, is to be credulous indeed.&nbsp; The Baconians, representing
+Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as &ldquo;the old
+hermit of Prague,&rdquo; destroy their own case.&nbsp; A Will who had
+to make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even
+to the call-boy of his company.&nbsp; Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s bookless
+Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of &ldquo;bumbasting
+out a blank verse,&rdquo; is a rather less impossible pretender, indeed;
+but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one, write
+blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses?&nbsp;
+Where are the &ldquo;works&rdquo; of Poet-Ape?&nbsp; As to the man,
+even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was &ldquo;a handsome,
+well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant,
+smooth wit.&rdquo;&nbsp; To his fellow-actors he was &ldquo;so worthy
+a friend and fellow&rdquo; (associate).&nbsp; To Jonson, &ldquo;he was,
+indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy,
+brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that
+sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.&rdquo;&nbsp; If Jonson
+here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that
+extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as remarkable
+originality of richly figured expressions, which is so characteristic
+of the style of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays.&nbsp; In this prodigality
+he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; &ldquo;panting Time
+toils after him in vain,&rdquo; and even the reader, much more the listener,
+might say, <i>sufflaminandus est; </i>&ldquo;he needs to have the brake
+put on.&rdquo; <a name="citation287a"></a><a href="#footnote287a">{287a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will.&nbsp; Only despair
+can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare,
+Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as &ldquo;falling into those things which
+could not escape laughter . . . which were ridiculous.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But to this last poor shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians
+and Baconians reduced.<br>
+<br>
+Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.<br>
+<br>
+But it is &ldquo;impossible&rdquo; that a man should have known so much,
+especially of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners
+and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at
+a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty,
+the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles
+of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and
+every study furnished,&rdquo; says a contemporary. <a name="citation288a"></a><a href="#footnote288a">{288a}</a>&nbsp;
+If a doubter will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a
+play in quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold
+for fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a
+lover of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible.&nbsp; Such
+a man cannot be kept from books.<br>
+<br>
+If the reader will look into &ldquo;the translations and imitations
+of the classics which poured from the press . . . the poems and love-pamphlets
+and plays of the University wits&rdquo; (when these chanced to be printed),
+&ldquo;the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,&rdquo; <a name="citation288b"></a><a href="#footnote288b">{288b}</a>
+he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare
+blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in &ldquo;Adonis&rsquo; garden.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated
+with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic <i>dicta </i>- a world
+of knowledge of a kind then &ldquo;in widest commonalty spread,&rdquo;
+but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore
+seems recondite learning.<br>
+<br>
+The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could
+get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to &ldquo;dispute their
+way through Europe,&rdquo; made the Italian tour, and, notoriously,
+were &ldquo;Italianate.&rdquo;&nbsp; They would not be chary of reminiscences
+of Florence, Venice, and Rome.&nbsp; Actors visited Denmark and Germany.&nbsp;
+No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious
+Venetian &ldquo;tranect or common ferry,&rdquo; the gondolas, and the
+Rialto.&nbsp; There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the
+foreign wars.&nbsp; Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised
+by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of
+Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish.&nbsp;
+That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian
+fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works.&nbsp;
+For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly&rsquo;s
+Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the
+houses of the great.&nbsp; As to untaught nobility of manners, there
+came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village
+on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite
+grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her: of her manners
+and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant
+evidence.&nbsp; Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic
+record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d&rsquo;Arc.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;<i>Ne me dites jamais cette b&ecirc;te de mot</i>,<i> impossible</i>,&rdquo;<i>
+</i>said Napoleon: it is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.<br>
+<br>
+If intellectual &ldquo;miracles&rdquo; were impossible to genius, even
+Bacon could not have been and done all that he was and did, and also
+the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not
+have been the scholar that he was.&nbsp; For the rest, I need not return
+on my tracks and explain once more such shallow mysteries as the &ldquo;Silence
+of Philip Henslowe,&rdquo; and the lack of literary anecdotage about
+Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town.&nbsp; Had Will,
+not Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough
+of the kind desired.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;We have the epics of Homer,&rdquo; people say, &ldquo;what matters
+it whether they be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business
+through seven centuries?&nbsp; We have the plays of Shakespeare, what
+matters it whether he, or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries,
+such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give
+love and praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Ach&aelig;an
+&ldquo;Father of the rest&rdquo;; and to &ldquo;friendly Shakespeare.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+APPENDICES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+APPENDIX I: &ldquo;TROILUS AND CRESSIDA&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+To myself <i>Troilus and Cressida </i>is, with <i>Henry VI</i>,<i> </i>Part
+I, the most mysterious among the Shakespearean plays.&nbsp; Here we
+find, if Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of
+the modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the
+ancient world; but the English author&rsquo;s eyes are dimmed by the
+mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy.&nbsp;
+The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before
+our era, when, by the author of the <i>Cypria</i>,<i> </i>these favourite
+heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as scoundrels,
+assassins, and cowards.<br>
+<br>
+In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer
+is no scholar.&nbsp; He makes the Ach&aelig;an fleet muster in &ldquo;the
+port of <i>Athens</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>of all places.&nbsp; Even Ovid
+gave the Homeric trysting-place, Aulis, in B&oelig;otia.&nbsp; (This
+Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.)&nbsp; Six gates hath the Englishman&rsquo;s
+Troy, and the Sc&aelig;an is not one of them.<br>
+<br>
+The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are
+from the medi&aelig;val Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer,
+whose Pandarus is only notable for loosing a traitor&rsquo;s shaft at
+Menelaus, in time of truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede.&nbsp;
+The play begins after the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus:
+in the play, not in Homer, Paris &ldquo;retires hurt,&rdquo; as is at
+first reported.&nbsp; Hector has a special grudge against the Telamonian
+Aias.&nbsp; As in the Iliad there is a view of the Ach&aelig;ans, taken
+from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the play, Pandarus and Cressida
+review the Trojans re-entering the city.&nbsp; Paris turns out not to
+be hurt after all.<br>
+<br>
+In Act i. Scene 3, the Ach&aelig;ans hold council, and regret the disaffection
+of Achilles.&nbsp; Here comes Ulysses&rsquo; great speech on discipline,
+in armies, and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly
+thought to be a leaf in Shakespeare&rsquo;s crown of bays.&nbsp; The
+speeches of Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats
+Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do.&nbsp; But the poet
+represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at Patroclus&rsquo;s
+imitation of the cough and other infirmities of old Nestor, to which
+Homer, naturally, never alludes.&nbsp; Throughout, the English poet
+regards Achilles with the eyes of his most infamous late Greek and ignorant
+medi&aelig;val detractors.&nbsp; The Homeric sequence of events is so
+far preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and Menelaus,
+comes (through &AElig;neas) the challenge by Hector to fight any Greek
+in &ldquo;gentle and joyous passage of arms&rdquo; (Iliad, VII).&nbsp;
+As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but
+by the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot
+falls on Aias.&nbsp; In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic
+as Porthos in <i>Les Trois Mousquetaires</i>.&nbsp; The play makes him
+as great an eater of beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.&nbsp;
+Achilles, save in a passage quite out of accord with the rest of the
+piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is discourteous, and is cowardly!&nbsp;
+No poet and no scholar who knew Homer&rsquo;s heroes in Homer&rsquo;s
+Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites
+are loathsome in their profusion of filthy thoughts.&nbsp; It does not
+follow that Will did not write the part of Thersites.&nbsp; Some of
+the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse adorn the play;
+one would say that no man but Will could have written them.&nbsp; Troilus
+and Cressida, at first, appear &ldquo;to dally with the innocence of
+love&rdquo;; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines
+in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek
+camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love.&nbsp;
+But the Homeric and the alien later elements, - the story of false love,
+- cannot be successfully combined.&nbsp; The poet, whoever he was, appears
+to weary and to break down.&nbsp; He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends,
+with the death of Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while
+resting unarmed, without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of
+sumptuous mail from a nameless runaway.&nbsp; In the play he has slain
+Patroclus, but has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which,
+in Homer, he is wearing.&nbsp; Achilles then meets Hector, but far from
+rushing to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters
+his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless Hector.<br>
+<br>
+Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a
+day becomes &ldquo;the sluttish spoil of opportunity,&rdquo; and of
+Diomede, and the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of
+1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light
+o&rsquo; love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly
+Hector.&nbsp; Yet there seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and
+broken lights from the splendour of Homer.&nbsp; When Achilles eyes
+Hector all over, during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking
+in what part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of
+Iliad, XXII, 320-326, where Achilles searches his own armour, worn by
+Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn by Hector, for a chink
+in the mail.&nbsp; Yet, after all, these points are taken, not from
+the Iliad, but from Caxton&rsquo;s popular Troy Book.<br>
+<br>
+Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men to<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;cry amain,<br>
+Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+we think of Iliad, XXII, 390-393, where Achilles commands the Myrmidons
+to go singing the p&aelig;an<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls
+his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus.&nbsp; But, in fact,
+this passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from Caxton,
+except as regards the p&aelig;an.<br>
+<br>
+It may be worth noting that Chapman&rsquo;s first instalment of his
+translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and VII-XI, appeared
+in 1598, and thence the author could adapt the passages from Iliad,
+Book VII.&nbsp; In or about 1598-9 occurred, in <i>Histriomastix</i>,<i>
+</i>by Marston and others, a burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing
+Cressida, speaks of &ldquo;thy knight,&rdquo; who &ldquo;<i>Shakes </i>his
+furious <i>Speare</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>while in April 1599, Henslowe&rsquo;s
+account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and Chettle for
+a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of Nottingham&rsquo;s Company.
+<a name="citation297a"></a><a href="#footnote297a">{297a}</a>&nbsp;
+Of this play no more is known, nor can we be sure that Chapman&rsquo;s
+seven Books of the Iliad (I, II, VII-XI) of 1598 attracted the attention
+of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to Trojan affairs.&nbsp;
+The coincidences at least are curious.&nbsp; If &ldquo;<i>Shakes </i>his
+furious <i>Speare</i>&rdquo;<i> </i>in <i>Histriomastix </i>refers to
+Shakespeare in connection with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker and
+Chettle were doing a <i>Troilus and Cressida </i>for a company not Shakespeare&rsquo;s,
+then there were <i>two Troilus and Cressida </i>in the field.&nbsp;
+A licence to print a <i>Troilus and Cressida </i>was obtained in 1602-3,
+but the quarto of our play, the Shakespearean play, is of 1609, &ldquo;as
+it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain&rsquo;s men,&rdquo; that is, by Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+Company.&nbsp; Now Dekker and Chettle wrote, apparently, for Lord Nottingham&rsquo;s
+Company.&nbsp; One quarto of 1609 declares, in a Preface, that the play
+has &ldquo;never been staled with the stage&rdquo;; another edition
+of the same year, from the same publishers, has not the Preface, but
+declares that the piece &ldquo;was acted by the King&rsquo;s Majesty&rsquo;s
+servants <i>at the Globe</i>.&rdquo; <a name="citation298a"></a><a href="#footnote298a">{298a}</a>&nbsp;
+The author of the Preface (Ben Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, <a name="citation298b"></a><a href="#footnote298b">{298b}</a>)
+speaks only of a single author, who has written other admirable comedies.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;When he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble
+for them, and set up a new English Inquisition.&rdquo;&nbsp; Why?&nbsp;
+The whole affair is a puzzle.&nbsp; But if the author of the Preface
+is right about the single author of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,<i>
+</i>and if Shakespeare is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in
+<i>Histriomastix </i>(1599), then it appears to me that Shakespeare,
+in 1598-9, after Chapman&rsquo;s portion of the Iliad appeared, was
+author of one <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,<i> </i>extant in 1602-3 (when
+its publication was barred till the publisher &ldquo;got authority&rdquo;),
+while Chettle and Dekker, in April 1599, were busy with another <i>Troilus
+and Cressida</i>,<i> </i>as why should they not be?&nbsp; In an age
+so lax about copyright, if their play was of their own original making,
+are we to suppose that there was copyright in the names of the leading
+persons of the piece, Troilus and Cressida?<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps not: but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge Stotsenburg&rsquo;s
+opinion <a name="citation298c"></a><a href="#footnote298c">{298c}</a>
+that Henslowe&rsquo;s entries of April 1599 &ldquo;refute the Shakespearean
+claim to the authorship of <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>,&rdquo;<i> </i>which
+exhibits &ldquo;the collaboration of two men,&rdquo; as &ldquo;leading
+commentators&rdquo; hold that it does.&nbsp; But the learned Judge mentions
+as a conceivable alternative that &ldquo;there were two plays on the
+subject with the same name,&rdquo; and, really, it looks as if there
+were!&nbsp; The Judge does not agree &ldquo;with Webb and other gifted
+writers that Bacon wrote this play.&rdquo;&nbsp; So far the Court is
+quite with him.&nbsp; He goes on however, &ldquo;It was, in my opinion,
+based on the foregoing facts, originally the production of Dekker and
+Chettle, added to and philosophically dressed by Francis Bacon.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But, according to Mr. Greenwood, &ldquo;it is admitted not only that
+the different writing of two authors is apparent in the Folio play,
+but also that &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; must have had at least some
+share in a play of <i>Troilus and Cressida </i>as early as the very
+year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker and Chettle are found engaged
+in writing their play of that name,&rdquo; on the evidence of <i>Histriomastix</i>.
+<a name="citation299a"></a><a href="#footnote299a">{299a}</a>&nbsp;
+How that evidence proves that &ldquo;a play of <i>Troilus and Cressida
+</i>had been <i>published </i>as by &lsquo;Shakespeare&rsquo; about
+1599,&rdquo; I know not.&nbsp; Perhaps &ldquo;published&rdquo; means
+&ldquo;acted&rdquo;?&nbsp; &ldquo;And it is not unreasonable to suppose
+that this play&rdquo; (&ldquo;published as by Shakespeare&rdquo;) &ldquo;was
+the one to which Henslowe alludes&rdquo; - as being written in April
+1599, by Dekker and Chettle.<br>
+<br>
+If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker,
+Chettle, and &ldquo;Shakespeare,&rdquo; the Great Unknown, or Bacon.&nbsp;
+He collaborates with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham&rsquo;s
+men (according to Sir Sidney Lee), <a name="citation300a"></a><a href="#footnote300a">{300a}</a>
+but it is, later at least, played by Shakespeare&rsquo;s company; and
+perhaps Bacon gets none of the &pound;4 paid <a name="citation300b"></a><a href="#footnote300b">{300b}</a>
+to Dekker and Chettle.&nbsp; Henslowe does not record his sale of the
+Dekker and Chettle play to Shakespeare&rsquo;s or to any company or
+purchaser.&nbsp; Without an entry of the careful Henslowe recording
+his receipts for the sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser,
+it is not easy to see how Shakespeare&rsquo;s company procured the manuscript,
+and thus enabled him to refashion it.&nbsp; Perhaps no reader will fail
+to recognise his hand in the beautiful blank verse of many passages.&nbsp;
+I am not familiar enough with the works of Dekker and Chettle to assign
+to them the less desirable passages.&nbsp; Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo
+of Swift&rsquo;s might poison with such phrases as his the name and
+nature of love, loyalty, and military courage.&nbsp; But whatsoever
+Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man delighted
+him not, nor woman either, he may have written the whole piece, in which
+love perishes for the whim of &ldquo;a daughter of the game,&rdquo;
+and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the vanity of his cowardly
+Achilles.&nbsp; If Shakespeare read the books translated by Chapman,
+he must have read them in the same spirit as Keats, and was likely to
+find that the poetry of the Ach&aelig;an could not be combined with
+the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he knew them in the
+medi&aelig;val books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate and Caxton.&nbsp;
+The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not follow.&nbsp; Probably
+Will looked on the play as one of his failures.&nbsp; The Editor, if
+we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio clearly thrust the play in late,
+so confusedly that it is not paged, and is not mentioned in the table
+of the contents.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The Grand Possessors&rdquo; of the play referred to in the Preface
+to one of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+Company.&nbsp; In this case the owners would not permit the publication
+of the play if they could prevent it.&nbsp; The title provokes Mr. Greenwood
+to say, &ldquo;Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent;
+indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous.&rdquo; <a name="citation301a"></a><a href="#footnote301a">{301a}</a>&nbsp;
+Of course, if the players were the possessors, &ldquo;grand&rdquo; is
+merely a jeer, by a person advertising a successful piracy.&nbsp; And
+in regard to Tieck&rsquo;s conjecture that James I is alluded to as
+&ldquo;the grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly written,&rdquo;
+<a name="citation301b"></a><a href="#footnote301b">{301b}</a> the autocratic
+James was very capable of protecting himself against larcenous publishers.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+APPENDIX II - CHETTLE&rsquo;S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In discussing contemporary allusions to William Shakspere or Shakespeare
+(or however you spell the name), I have not relied on Chettle&rsquo;s
+remarks (in <i>Kind-Hart&rsquo;s Dreame, </i>1592) concerning Greene&rsquo;s
+<i>Groatsworth of Wit</i>.&nbsp; Chettle speaks of it, saying, &ldquo;in
+which a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one
+or two of them taken.&rdquo;&nbsp; It appears that by &ldquo;one or
+two&rdquo; Chettle means <i>two</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;With <i>neither </i>of
+them that take offence was I acquainted&rdquo; (at the time when he
+edited the <i>Groatsworth), </i>&ldquo;and with one of them I care not
+if I never be.&rdquo;&nbsp; We do not know who &ldquo;the Gentlemen
+his Quondam acquaintance,&rdquo; addressed by Greene, were.&nbsp; They
+are usually supposed to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, or Nash.&nbsp;
+We do not know which of the two who take offence is the man with whom
+Chettle did not care to be acquainted.&nbsp; Of &ldquo;the other,&rdquo;
+according to Chettle, &ldquo;myself have seen his demeanour no less
+civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes&rdquo; (that
+is, &ldquo;in his profession,&rdquo; as we say), &ldquo;besides divers
+of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his
+honesty; and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the person of
+whom he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and <i>(apparently) </i>that
+he is &ldquo;excellent in the quality he professes&rdquo; - in his profession.&nbsp;
+Speaking on the evidence of &ldquo;divers of worship,&rdquo; the same
+man is said to possess &ldquo;facetious grace in writing.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Had his writings been then published, Chettle, a bookish man, would
+have read them and formed his own opinion.&nbsp; Works of Lodge, Peele,
+and Marlowe had been published.&nbsp; Writing is <i>not </i>&ldquo;the
+quality he professes,&rdquo; is not the &ldquo;profession&rdquo; of
+the man to whom Chettle refers.&nbsp; On the other hand, the profession
+of Greene&rsquo;s &ldquo;Quondam acquaintance&rdquo; <i>was </i>writing,
+&ldquo;they spend their wits in making Plays.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus the
+man who wrote, but whose profession was not that of writing, does not,
+so far, appear to have been one of those addressed by Greene.&nbsp;
+It seems undeniable that Greene addresses gentlemen who are &ldquo;playmakers,&rdquo;
+who &ldquo;spend their wits in making Plays,&rdquo; and who are <i>not
+</i>actors; for Greene&rsquo;s purpose is to warn them against the rich,
+ungrateful actors.&nbsp; If Greene&rsquo;s friends, at the moment when
+he wrote, were, or if any one of them then was, by profession an actor,
+Greene&rsquo;s warning to him against actors, directed to an actor,
+is not, to me, intelligible.&nbsp; But Mr. Greenwood writes, &ldquo;As
+I have shown, George Peele was one of the playwrights addressed by Greene,
+and Peele was a successful player as well as playwright, and might quite
+truly have been alluded to both as having &lsquo;facetious grace in
+writing,&rsquo; and being &lsquo;excellent in the quality he professed,&rsquo;
+that is, as a professional actor.&rdquo; <a name="citation304a"></a><a href="#footnote304a">{304a}</a><br>
+<br>
+I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of Oxford, had
+ever been a player, and a successful player.&nbsp; But one may ask,
+- in 1592 did George Peele &ldquo;profess the quality&rdquo; of an actor;
+was he then a professional actor, and only an occasional playwright?&nbsp;
+If so, I am not apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not
+to put faith in the members of his own profession.&nbsp; From them,
+as a successful member of their profession (a profession which, as Greene
+complains, &ldquo;exploited&rdquo; dramatic authors), Peele stood in
+no danger.&nbsp; Thus I do not see how Chettle&rsquo;s professional
+actor, reported to have facetious grace in writing, can be identified
+with Peele.&nbsp; The identification seems to me impossible.&nbsp; Peele
+and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering,
+though a literary man; he had not yet become a physician.&nbsp; In 1592,
+none of the three had any profession but that of literature, so far
+as I am aware.&nbsp; The man who had a special profession, and also
+wrote, was not one of these three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere literary
+gentleman, pamphleteer and playwright.<br>
+<br>
+I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene addressed
+the <i>Groatsworth, </i>though the atheistic writer of tragedies seems
+meant, and disgracefully meant, for Marlowe.&nbsp; I only know that
+Chettle is expressing his regrets for Greene&rsquo;s language to some
+one whom he applauded as to his exercise of his profession; and who,
+according to &ldquo;divers of worship,&rdquo; had also &ldquo;facetious
+grace in writing.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Myself have seen him no less civil
+than he is excellent in the quality he professes&rdquo;; whether or
+not this means that Chettle has <i>seen </i>his excellence in his profession,
+I cannot tell for certain; but Chettle&rsquo;s remark is, at least,
+contrasted with what he gives merely from report - &ldquo;the facetious
+grace in writing&rdquo; of the man in question.&nbsp; <i>His </i>writing
+is not part of his profession, so he is not, in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge,
+Peele, Marlowe, or Nash.<br>
+<br>
+Who, then, is this mysterious personage?&nbsp; Malone, Dyce, Steevens,
+Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse
+and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere.&nbsp;
+But Mr. Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose &ldquo;mind&rdquo; is &ldquo;legal,&rdquo;
+have pointed out that this weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere,
+if Greene meant Shakspere), attacked by Greene.&nbsp; For Chettle says
+that in the <i>Groatsworth of Wit </i>&ldquo;a letter, written to divers
+play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The mysterious one is, therefore, one of the playwrights addressed by
+Greene.&nbsp; Consequently all the followers of Malone, who wrote before
+Messrs. Fleay and Castle, are mistaken; and what Mr. Greenwood has to
+say about Sir Sidney Lee, J. C. Collins, and Dr. Garnett, and Mr. Gosse,
+in the way of moral reprobation, may be read by the curious in his pages.
+<a name="citation305a"></a><a href="#footnote305a">{305a}</a><br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile, if we take Chettle to have been a strict grammarian, by his
+words - &ldquo;a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively
+by one or two of them taken,&rdquo; Will is excluded; the letter was
+most assuredly not written to <i>him</i>.&nbsp; But I, whose mind is
+not legal, am not certain that Chettle does not mean that the letter,
+written to divers play-makers, was by one or two makers of plays offensively
+taken.<br>
+<br>
+This opinion seems the less improbable, as the person to whom Chettle
+is most apologetic excels in a quality or profession, which is contrasted
+with, and is not identical with, &ldquo;his facetious grace in writing&rdquo;
+- a <i>parergon, </i>or &ldquo; bye-work,&rdquo; in his case.&nbsp;
+Whoever this person was, he certainly was not Marlowe, Peele, Lodge,
+or Nash.&nbsp; We must look for some other person who had a profession,
+and also was reported to have facetious grace in writing.<br>
+<br>
+If Chettle is to be held tight to grammar, Greene referred to some one
+unknown, some one who wrote for the stage, but had another profession.&nbsp;
+If Chettle is not to be thus tautly construed, I confess that to myself
+he seems to have had Shakspere, even Will, in his mind.&nbsp; For Will
+in 1592 had &ldquo;a quality which he professed,&rdquo; that of an actor;
+and also (I conceive) was reported to have &ldquo; facetious grace in
+writing.&rdquo;&nbsp; But other gentlemen may have combined these attributes;
+wherefore I lay no stress on the statements of Chettle, as if they referred
+to our Will Shakspere.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0a"></a><a href="#citation0a">{0a}</a>&nbsp; E. J.
+Castle, <i>Shakespeare</i>,<i> Bacon</i>,<i> Jonson</i>,<i> and Greene</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 194-195.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0b"></a><a href="#citation0b">{0b}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 145.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0c"></a><a href="#citation0c">{0c}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 340.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0d"></a><a href="#citation0d">{0d}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 340, 341.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0e"></a><a href="#citation0e">{0e}</a>&nbsp; <i>In
+Re Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 54.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0f"></a><a href="#citation0f">{0f}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 341.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0g"></a><a href="#citation0g">{0g}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 470.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0h"></a><a href="#citation0h">{0h}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 339.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0i"></a><a href="#citation0i">{0i}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>pp. 115-116.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0j"></a><a href="#citation0j">{0j}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 49.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote0k"></a><a href="#citation0k">{0k}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 14.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a">{4a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Francis
+Bacon Wrote Shakespeare</i>.&nbsp; By H. Crouch-Batchelor, 1912.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote7a"></a><a href="#citation7a">{7a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespere Problem Restated</i>, p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote11a"></a><a href="#citation11a">{11a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 31-37.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote13a"></a><a href="#citation13a">{13a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 36-37.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote16a"></a><a href="#citation16a">{16a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Tue
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 20.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17a"></a><a href="#citation17a">{17a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 47-48.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17b"></a><a href="#citation17b">{17b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 54-55.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17c"></a><a href="#citation17c">{17c}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 54.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17d"></a><a href="#citation17d">{17d}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 56.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17e"></a><a href="#citation17e">{17e}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 59.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17f"></a><a href="#citation17f">{17f}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 62.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote17g"></a><a href="#citation17g">{17g}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid.</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 193.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote18a"></a><a href="#citation18a">{18a}</a>&nbsp; See
+his <i>Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>, p. 210.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote19a"></a><a href="#citation19a">{19a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 187.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote19b"></a><a href="#citation19b">{19b}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 223.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote21a"></a><a href="#citation21a">{21a}</a>&nbsp; <i>In
+Re Shakespeare</i>, p. 54.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote22a"></a><a href="#citation22a">{22a}</a>&nbsp; In
+a brief note of two pages (<i>Cornhill Magazine</i>,<i> </i>November
+1911) he makes such reply as the space permits to a paper of my own,
+&ldquo;Shakespeare or X?&rdquo; in the September number.&nbsp; With
+my goodwill he might have written thirty-two pages to my sixteen, but
+I am not the Editor, and never heard of Mr. Greenwood&rsquo;s note till
+May 1912.<br>
+<br>
+He says that I had represented him as stating that the Unknown genius
+adopted the name of William Shake-speare or Shakespeare as a good <i>nom
+de guerre</i>, without any reference to the fact that there was an actor
+in existence of the name of William Shakspere, whose name was sometimes
+written Shakespeare, and without the least idea that the works he published
+under this pseudonym would be fathered upon the actor . . . &rdquo;
+(My meaning has obviously been too obscurely stated by me.)<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Greenwood next writes that the confusion between the actor, and
+the unknown taking the name William Shakespeare, &ldquo;did happen and
+was intended to happen.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>C</i>&rsquo;<i>est l&agrave; le miracle</i>!<br>
+<br>
+How could it happen if the actor were the bookless, ignorant man whom
+Mr. Greenwood describes?&nbsp; It could not happen: Will must have been
+unmasked in a day.&nbsp; The fact that a strange plot existed was only
+too obvious.&nbsp; The Unknown&rsquo;s secret must have been tracked
+by the hounds of keenest nose in the packs of rival and jealous authors
+and of actors.&nbsp; None gives tongue.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote27a"></a><a href="#citation27a">{27a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Francis
+Bacon Wrote Shakespeare</i>, p. 37.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote30a"></a><a href="#citation30a">{30a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 333.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote31a"></a><a href="#citation31a">{31a}</a>&nbsp; In
+the passage which I quoted, with notes of omission, from Mr. Greenwood
+(p. 333), he went on to say that the eulogies of the poet by &ldquo;some
+cultured critics of that day,&rdquo; &ldquo;afford no proof that the
+author who published under the name of Shakespeare was in reality Shakspere
+the Stratford player.&rdquo;&nbsp; That position I later contest.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote31b"></a><a href="#citation31b">{31b}</a>&nbsp; See
+chap. XI, <i>The First Folio.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote33a"></a><a href="#citation33a">{33a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 305, 306.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote34a"></a><a href="#citation34a">{34a}</a>&nbsp; Furness,
+<i>Merchant of Venice</i>,<i> </i>pp. 271, 272.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote34b"></a><a href="#citation34b">{34b}</a>&nbsp; On
+this see Mr. Pollard&rsquo;s <i>Shakespeare Folios and Quartos</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 1-9.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote37a"></a><a href="#citation37a">{37a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 202, 348, 349.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote38a"></a><a href="#citation38a">{38a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 349.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote44a"></a><a href="#citation44a">{44a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote45a"></a><a href="#citation45a">{45a}</a>&nbsp; <i>In
+Re Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 88, note I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote48a"></a><a href="#citation48a">{48a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies
+in Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 15; <i>Life of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>by
+Malone, pp. 561-2, 564; Appendix, XI, xvi.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote50a"></a><a href="#citation50a">{50a}</a>&nbsp; C.
+I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,
+pp. 97, 98.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote51a"></a><a href="#citation51a">{51a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 44.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote52a"></a><a href="#citation52a">{52a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 39.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote52b"></a><a href="#citation52b">{52b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators
+of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 210.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote53a"></a><a href="#citation53a">{53a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Vindicators
+of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 187.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote53b"></a><a href="#citation53b">{53b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare
+Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 223.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote55a"></a><a href="#citation55a">{55a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 69.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote56a"></a><a href="#citation56a">{56a}</a>&nbsp; See
+chapter X, <i>The Traditional Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote56b"></a><a href="#citation56b">{56b}</a>&nbsp;
+See C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 48, 343-8.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote57a"></a><a href="#citation57a">{57a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 207-9.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote59a"></a><a href="#citation59a">{59a}</a>&nbsp; Chapter
+X, <i>infra.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote62a"></a><a href="#citation62a">{62a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 96.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote62b"></a><a href="#citation62b">{62b}</a>&nbsp; See
+chapter X, <i>The Traditional Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote62c"></a><a href="#citation62c">{62c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 94-96.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote64a"></a><a href="#citation64a">{64a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Shakespeare</i>,<i>
+</i>pp. 38-40.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote65a"></a><a href="#citation65a">{65a}</a>&nbsp; Raleigh,
+<i>Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>pp. 77, 78.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote69a"></a><a href="#citation69a">{69a}</a>&nbsp; So
+he seems to me to do; but in <i>Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p.
+135, he shows great caution: &ldquo;I refer the reader to Mr. Collin&rsquo;s
+essay, and ask him to judge for himself.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote71a"></a><a href="#citation71a">{71a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies
+in Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 15.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote72a"></a><a href="#citation72a">{72a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies
+in Shakespeare</i>, p. 21.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote75a"></a><a href="#citation75a">{75a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Alcibiades</i>,<i>
+</i>I, pp. 132, 133; <i>Troilus</i>,<i> </i>III, scene 3.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote77a"></a><a href="#citation77a">{77a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Studies
+in Shakespeare</i>, p. 46.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote77b"></a><a href="#citation77b">{77b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Iliad</i>,
+p. 63.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote91a"></a><a href="#citation91a">{91a}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 54, 55.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote93a"></a><a href="#citation93a">{93a}</a>&nbsp; <i>National
+Review</i>, vol. xxxix., 1902.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote93b"></a><a href="#citation93b">{93b}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Pilot</i>, Aug. 30, 1902, p. 220.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote96a"></a><a href="#citation96a">{96a}</a>&nbsp; The
+oldest mention of a <i>circulating</i> library known to me is in Hull,
+in 1650, when Sir James Turner found it excellent.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote97a"></a><a href="#citation97a">{97a}</a>&nbsp; In
+his <i>Shakespeare </i>(<i>English Men of Letters</i>),<i> </i>pp. 66,
+67.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote97b"></a><a href="#citation97b">{97b}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 77, 78.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote97c"></a><a href="#citation97c">{97c}</a>&nbsp; <i>The
+Shakespearean Myth</i>,<i> </i>p. 162.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote100a"></a><a href="#citation100a">{100a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 76.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote101a"></a><a href="#citation101a">{101a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 81, note I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote103a"></a><a href="#citation103a">{103a}</a>&nbsp;
+Penzance, <i>The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy</i>,<i> </i>pp. 150,
+151.&nbsp; Citing Appleton Morgan&rsquo;s <i>Shakespearean Myth, </i>pp.
+248, 298.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote106a"></a><a href="#citation106a">{106a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 175.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote107a"></a><a href="#citation107a">{107a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 457.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote109a"></a><a href="#citation109a">{109a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 58.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote109b"></a><a href="#citation109b">{109b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Apology the Actors</i>,<i> </i>1612.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote110a"></a><a href="#citation110a">{110a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 267.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote111a"></a><a href="#citation111a">{111a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, pp. 267, 268.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote112a"></a><a href="#citation112a">{112a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, pp. 50-52.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote113a"></a><a href="#citation113a">{113a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 51.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote113b"></a><a href="#citation113b">{113b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 51.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote113c"></a><a href="#citation113c">{113c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid</i>., p. 500, citing Mr. Reed&rsquo;s <i>Francis Bacon our Shake-speare</i>,<i>
+</i>chap. ii. pp. 62, 63.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote113d"></a><a href="#citation113d">{113d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 500-520, chap xvi.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote114a"></a><a href="#citation114a">{114a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 512.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote114b"></a><a href="#citation114b">{114b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid</i>., p. 514.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote114c"></a><a href="#citation114c">{114c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid</i>., p. 386, note I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote114d"></a><a href="#citation114d">{114d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 93.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote120a"></a><a href="#citation120a">{120a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Cambridge History of English Literature</i>,<i> </i>vol. v. p. 126.&nbsp;
+Prof. G. P. Baker.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote121a"></a><a href="#citation121a">{121a}</a>&nbsp;
+Furness, <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s Lost</i>,<i> </i>pp.
+xiii., 348-350: <i>cf. </i>pp. 348, 349, for the four distinct styles
+of linguistic affectation of the period, at least as they are represented
+in literature.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote121b"></a><a href="#citation121b">{121b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light</i>,<i> </i>Appendix on Marlowe.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote124a"></a><a href="#citation124a">{124a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 516.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote126a"></a><a href="#citation126a">{126a}</a>&nbsp;
+Act i.&nbsp; Scene 2.&nbsp; Furness, <i>Love</i>&rsquo;<i>s Labour</i>&rsquo;<i>s
+Lost</i>,<i> </i>p. 45, note.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote127a"></a><a href="#citation127a">{127a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 67, 68.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote129a"></a><a href="#citation129a">{129a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 66.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote129b"></a><a href="#citation129b">{129b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 67.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote136a"></a><a href="#citation136a">{136a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 307.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote138a"></a><a href="#citation138a">{138a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 308.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote140a"></a><a href="#citation140a">{140a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 309.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote141a"></a><a href="#citation141a">{141a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 310.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote141b"></a><a href="#citation141b">{141b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 310, 311.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote141c"></a><a href="#citation141c">{141c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 311.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote142a"></a><a href="#citation142a">{142a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 309.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote142b"></a><a href="#citation142b">{142b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 311, 312.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote143a"></a><a href="#citation143a">{143a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 312, 313.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote145a"></a><a href="#citation145a">{145a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 313.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote146a"></a><a href="#citation146a">{146a}</a>&nbsp;
+See Appendix II, &ldquo;<i>Chettle</i>&rsquo;<i>s supposed allusion
+to Will Shakspere.</i>&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote147a"></a><a href="#citation147a">{147a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 330.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote149a"></a><a href="#citation149a">{149a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>pp. 115, 116, 211.&nbsp;
+<i>See</i> my Introduction, p. xxii.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote150a"></a><a href="#citation150a">{150a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 210.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote150b"></a><a href="#citation150b">{150b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 136.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote151a"></a><a href="#citation151a">{151a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 338.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote155a"></a><a href="#citation155a">{155a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 346.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote157a"></a><a href="#citation157a">{157a}</a>&nbsp;
+Cited in <i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 353.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote159a"></a><a href="#citation159a">{159a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 353.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote159b"></a><a href="#citation159b">{159b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Diary</i>,<i> </i>pp. xxvii, xxviii.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote160a"></a><a href="#citation160a">{160a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 367.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote160b"></a><a href="#citation160b">{160b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 368, 369.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote161a"></a><a href="#citation161a">{161a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 354.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote163a"></a><a href="#citation163a">{163a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 366.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote164a"></a><a href="#citation164a">{164a}</a>&nbsp;
+Some Baconians say so!<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote171a"></a><a href="#citation171a">{171a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 181, 397.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote171b"></a><a href="#citation171b">{171b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 186.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote174a"></a><a href="#citation174a">{174a}</a>&nbsp;
+Some verses of Fletcher&rsquo;s may, perhaps, refer to Beaumont&rsquo;s
+death.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote175a"></a><a href="#citation175a">{175a}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,<i> </i>pp.
+246, 247.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote175b"></a><a href="#citation175b">{175b}</a>&nbsp;
+As to the Aldine Ovid in the Bodleian, see Mr. Greenwood in <i>The Vindicators
+of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>pp. 191, 192.&nbsp; Of course he raises every
+objection, but I do not feel sure that either an affirmative or negative
+result can be attained by <i>expertise</i>.&nbsp; We are not told when
+or where the Bodleian obtained the book; nor what is the date of the
+handwriting of the inscription about W. Hall, a personage whom we are
+to meet later.&nbsp; A good deal of business is done in forging names
+in books.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote176a"></a><a href="#citation176a">{176a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 196.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote176b"></a><a href="#citation176b">{176b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 197.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote177a"></a><a href="#citation177a">{177a}</a>&nbsp;
+See <i>Frontispiece</i>,<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote179a"></a><a href="#citation179a">{179a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 247, 248, note I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote180a"></a><a href="#citation180a">{180a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>National Review</i>,<i> </i>June 1912, p. 903.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote180b"></a><a href="#citation180b">{180b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>,<i> </i>November 1910.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote181a"></a><a href="#citation181a">{181a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Outlines</i>,<i> </i>vol. i. p. 283.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote182a"></a><a href="#citation182a">{182a}</a>&nbsp;
+P. 73, 1806.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote183a"></a><a href="#citation183a">{183a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Outlines</i>,<i> </i>vol. i. p. 283.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote183b"></a><a href="#citation183b">{183b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 247.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote186a"></a><a href="#citation186a">{186a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 248-249.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote186b"></a><a href="#citation186b">{186b}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,
+pp. 236-237.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote187a"></a><a href="#citation187a">{187a}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,
+p. 228.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote187b"></a><a href="#citation187b">{187b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 199.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote187c"></a><a href="#citation187c">{187c}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,
+pp. 332-333.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote187d"></a><a href="#citation187d">{187d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 250.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote188a"></a><a href="#citation188a">{188a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 199, note 1.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote189a"></a><a href="#citation189a">{189a}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,
+pp. 339, 342.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote190a"></a><a href="#citation190a">{190a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 238.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote198a"></a><a href="#citation198a">{198a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 214.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote200a"></a><a href="#citation200a">{200a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 214, note 2.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote201a"></a><a href="#citation201a">{201a}</a>&nbsp;
+C. I. Elton, <i>William Shakespeare</i>,<i> His Family and Friends</i>,<i>
+</i>p. 56.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote201b"></a><a href="#citation201b">{201b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 28, 29.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote207a"></a><a href="#citation207a">{207a}</a>&nbsp;
+Like Mr. Greenwood, I think that Ben was the penman.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote208a"></a><a href="#citation208a">{208a}</a>&nbsp;
+Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>,<i> </i>p. 10.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote210a"></a><a href="#citation210a">{210a}</a>&nbsp;
+Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>,<i> </i>pp. 64-80.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote215a"></a><a href="#citation215a">{215a}</a>&nbsp;
+Pollard, <i>ut supra</i>,<i> </i>pp. 121-124.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote216a"></a><a href="#citation216a">{216a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 287-288.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote217a"></a><a href="#citation217a">{217a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290-291.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote217b"></a><a href="#citation217b">{217b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 292, 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote218a"></a><a href="#citation218a">{218a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote219a"></a><a href="#citation219a">{219a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 489, 490.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote219b"></a><a href="#citation219b">{219b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 491.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote219c"></a><a href="#citation219c">{219c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Studies in Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 352.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote220a"></a><a href="#citation220a">{220a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote220b"></a><a href="#citation220b">{220b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 491.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote220c"></a><a href="#citation220c">{220c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote220d"></a><a href="#citation220d">{220d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote221a"></a><a href="#citation221a">{221a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 297.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote221b"></a><a href="#citation221b">{221b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 297.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote222a"></a><a href="#citation222a">{222a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote222b"></a><a href="#citation222b">{222b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote222c"></a><a href="#citation222c">{222c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote222d"></a><a href="#citation222d">{222d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290, 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote222e"></a><a href="#citation222e">{222e}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 351, 358.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223a"></a><a href="#citation223a">{223a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223b"></a><a href="#citation223b">{223b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290, 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223c"></a><a href="#citation223c">{223c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223d"></a><a href="#citation223d">{223d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223e"></a><a href="#citation223e">{223e}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290, 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223f"></a><a href="#citation223f">{223f}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 290.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223g"></a><a href="#citation223g">{223g}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290, 291.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote223h"></a><a href="#citation223h">{223h}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote224a"></a><a href="#citation224a">{224a}</a> <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 351.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote224b"></a><a href="#citation224b">{224b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 358.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote224c"></a><a href="#citation224c">{224c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 351, 358.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote224d"></a><a href="#citation224d">{224d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 290.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote224e"></a><a href="#citation224e">{224e}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote225a"></a><a href="#citation225a">{225a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 355, 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote226a"></a><a href="#citation226a">{226a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 355, 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote226b"></a><a href="#citation226b">{226b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 158, 160, 162 (&ldquo;not the original author&rdquo;),
+170.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote226c"></a><a href="#citation226c">{226c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid</i>., pp. 130-151, 160, 168.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote226d"></a><a href="#citation226d">{226d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p., 123, note 2.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote227a"></a><a href="#citation227a">{227a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228a"></a><a href="#citation228a">{228a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 160.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228b"></a><a href="#citation228b">{228b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228c"></a><a href="#citation228c">{228c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 160.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228d"></a><a href="#citation228d">{228d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 356.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228e"></a><a href="#citation228e">{228e}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 290, 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote228f"></a><a href="#citation228f">{228f}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 358.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote229a"></a><a href="#citation229a">{229a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 365.&nbsp; I will
+bet Mr. Greenwood any sum not exceeding half a crown that he cannot
+find any &ldquo;records of the writing of&rdquo; either of these plays
+in Henslowe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Diary,&rdquo; - his account book of expenses
+and receipts.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote229b"></a><a href="#citation229b">{229b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 365.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote229c"></a><a href="#citation229c">{229c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 365.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote229d"></a><a href="#citation229d">{229d}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 160.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote231a"></a><a href="#citation231a">{231a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 276.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote231b"></a><a href="#citation231b">{231b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 290.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote232a"></a><a href="#citation232a">{232a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 293.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote232b"></a><a href="#citation232b">{232b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 294.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote233a"></a><a href="#citation233a">{233a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>,<i> </i>p. 57 (1911).<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote237a"></a><a href="#citation237a">{237a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>, p. 453.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote244a"></a><a href="#citation244a">{244a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 466.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote245a"></a><a href="#citation245a">{245a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 313.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote245b"></a><a href="#citation245b">{245b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Supra, </i>p. 143.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote245c"></a><a href="#citation245c">{245c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 466.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote249a"></a><a href="#citation249a">{249a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 482.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote250a"></a><a href="#citation250a">{250a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 467, 471.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote250b"></a><a href="#citation250b">{250b}</a>&nbsp;
+See chapter IX on <i>The Later Life of Shakespeare.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote250c"></a><a href="#citation250c">{250c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 472, 474.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote251a"></a><a href="#citation251a">{251a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 473.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote251b"></a><a href="#citation251b">{251b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 474.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote253a"></a><a href="#citation253a">{253a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 475.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote254a"></a><a href="#citation254a">{254a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 106.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote255a"></a><a href="#citation255a">{255a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 478.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote258a"></a><a href="#citation258a">{258a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 480.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote259a"></a><a href="#citation259a">{259a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 483.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote260a"></a><a href="#citation260a">{260a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 483.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote260b"></a><a href="#citation260b">{260b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 489-490.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote260c"></a><a href="#citation260c">{260c}</a>&nbsp;
+See chapter XI, <i>The First Folio.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote261a"></a><a href="#citation261a">{261a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 483.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote261b"></a><a href="#citation261b">{261b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 489-491.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote262a"></a><a href="#citation262a">{262a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 486.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote264a"></a><a href="#citation264a">{264a}</a> <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 488.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote266a"></a><a href="#citation266a">{266a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 491.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote267a"></a><a href="#citation267a">{267a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 295, <i>cf. </i>p.
+499.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote268a"></a><a href="#citation268a">{268a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 295, 499.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote270a"></a><a href="#citation270a">{270a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 499.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote274a"></a><a href="#citation274a">{274a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>,<i> </i>edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 4 (1861).<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote275a"></a><a href="#citation275a">{275a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>,<i> </i>edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 31.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote275b"></a><a href="#citation275b">{275b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>vol. i. pp. 74-95.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote276a"></a><a href="#citation276a">{276a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>,<i> </i>edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. pp. 108-109.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote279a"></a><a href="#citation279a">{279a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>,<i> </i>edited by James Spedding,
+vol. i. p. 106.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote279b"></a><a href="#citation279b">{279b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>vol. i. pp. 121-143.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote280a"></a><a href="#citation280a">{280a}</a>&nbsp;
+Sixty pages in Spedding&rsquo;s <i>Letters and Life of Francis Bacon</i>,
+vol. i. pp. 146-208.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote281a"></a><a href="#citation281a">{281a}</a>&nbsp;
+See his statement (1603), Spedding, iii. pp. 84-87.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote281b"></a><a href="#citation281b">{281b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>iii. p. 253.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote282a"></a><a href="#citation282a">{282a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 371-406.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote282b"></a><a href="#citation282b">{282b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy</i>,<i> </i>p. 198.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote283a"></a><a href="#citation283a">{283a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 391.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote283b"></a><a href="#citation283b">{283b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 408-410.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote284a"></a><a href="#citation284a">{284a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 425.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote284b"></a><a href="#citation284b">{284b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 431.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote287a"></a><a href="#citation287a">{287a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Sufflamen </i>is the &ldquo;drag&rdquo; or &ldquo;brake.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Ben&rsquo;s, &ldquo;it was necessary he should be <i>stopped</i>,&rdquo;<i>
+</i>is an incorrect translation.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote288a"></a><a href="#citation288a">{288a}</a>&nbsp;
+Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, <i>Shakespeare</i>, p. 65.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote288b"></a><a href="#citation288b">{288b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid</i>., p. 65.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote297a"></a><a href="#citation297a">{297a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 358-362.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote298a"></a><a href="#citation298a">{298a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>pp. 491-494.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote298b"></a><a href="#citation298b">{298b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>p. 495.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote298c"></a><a href="#citation298c">{298c}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid.</i>,<i> </i>pp. 358-360.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote299a"></a><a href="#citation299a">{299a}</a> <i>The
+Shakespeare Problem Restated</i>,<i> </i>p. 361.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote300a"></a><a href="#citation300a">{300a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated, </i>p. 360.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote300b"></a><a href="#citation300b">{300b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid., </i>p. 358.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote301a"></a><a href="#citation301a">{301a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated, </i>p. 495, note I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote301b"></a><a href="#citation301b">{301b}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Ibid., </i>p. 494.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote304a"></a><a href="#citation304a">{304a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>Vindicators of Shakespeare</i>, p. 69.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote305a"></a><a href="#citation305a">{305a}</a>&nbsp;
+<i>The Shakespeare Problem Restated, </i>pp. 317-319.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SHAKESPEARE, BACON ETC. ***<br>
+<pre>
+
+******This file should be named sbun10h.htm or sbun10h.zip******
+Corrected EDITIONS of our EBooks get a new NUMBER, sbun11h.htm
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, sbun10ah.htm
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart hart@pobox.com
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+</pre></body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/sbun10h.zip b/old/sbun10h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dea2e1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/sbun10h.zip