9135Original
UT what is the summing up on the other side? Merely the following copy of verses:
TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US.
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much.
'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise
And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need,
I, therefore, will begin: Soul of the age,
The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare 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.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses.
I mean with great but disproportioned muses.=
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line;
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names: but call forth thundering Æschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us.
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the muses still were in their prime
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears; or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines!
Which were so richly spun and woven so fit
As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit,
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, how not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie
As they were not of nature's family.
Yet must I not give nature all; thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the poets matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat
Upon the muse's anvil; turn the same
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet's made, as well as born;
And such wert thou! Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filled lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance
As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make t-hose flights upon the banks of Thames
That did so take Eliza and our James!
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like
night
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
This is all there is of Jonson's labored verses, of which very few Shakespeareans care to quote more than isolated passages of a line or two each. But taking them either as a whole (with their involved metaphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about Shakespeare's lines "shaking a lance at Ignorance")—or in spots (whichever spots the Shakespeareans prefer), what sort of historical proof does this poem afford? What sort of testimony is this as to a fact? Is it the sort we accept in our own personal affairs—in our business—in our courts of justice—in matters in which we have any thing at stake, or any living interest? Will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship Dolphin, on being furnished, by the Dolphin's owners, with a thrilling poem by Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Tup-per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the Dolphin, the thunderous tempest in which she went down—the sky-capping waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., etc.? Will any jury of twelve men hang a thirteenth man for murder on production, by the State, of a harrowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassination, stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable widows, orphans, and the like? And shall we require less or more proof, in proportion as the fact to be proved is nearer or more remote?
However, since the Shakespeareans rest their case on these verses, (for any one who cares to examine for himself will find the residue of the so-called "contemporary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be rather criticism—that is to sayeulogy, for we find very little of any other sort of literary criticism in those days—as to the compositions than chronicle as to the man) we can well afford to waive these questions, and cross-examine Ben Jonson and his verses without pressing any objection to their competency.
For criticism of the works is what Meres's * opinion that "the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his "Venus and Adonis," his "Lucrece," his sugared sonnets among his private friends...." As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage....
* "Palladis Tamia."
As Epius Stoio said that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they would speake Latin, so I say that the Muses would speake with Shakespeare's fine-filed phrase, if they would speake English, etc., etc., etc., amount to; and so Weever's
"Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue,
I swore Apollo got them, and none other"—
probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he sworethat they were certainly Apollo's. And if the comments of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard Digges, Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. But panegyric is not history—at least it can not override history.
Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony, contained in the copy of verses entitled "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us," written by Mr. Ben Jon-son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, there would actually remain nothing except to lay the Shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of exploded fallacies.
However, let it not be ruled out merely on the ground that it is in rhyme. We have no less an authority than Littleton—"auetoritas philosopho-rum, medieorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan-dæ et tenendæ" *—to the effect that the testimony, even of poets, is sometimes to be received. It is to be ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of the witness—by its appearing that the witness, elsewhere in the same controversy, testifies to a state of facts exactly opposite. For the truth is that, whatever Ben Jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" William Shakespeare, whenever, "as a friend, hedropped into poetry," he was considerably more careful when he sat himself down to write "cold prose."
* "Co. Lit.," 264 A.
Just as "Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion should "fright the ladies," and "hang every mother's son" of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a man as other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, however tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in his prosody, in his prologue inprosewas scrupulous to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains—Ossian piled on Pelion—of hearsay and lapse of time; oceans of mere opinion and "gush" would, of course, amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged alongside of the testimony of one single, competent, contemporary eye-witness. No wonder the Shakespeareans are eager to subpoena Ben Jonson's verses. But, all the same, they are marvelously carefulnotto subpoena his prose.
And yet this prose is extant, and by no means inaccessible. Malien Jonson died, in 1637, he left behind him certain memoranda which were published in 1640, and are well-known as "Ben Jonson's Discoveries." One of these memoranda—for the work is in the disjointed form of a common-place book of occasional entries—is devoted to the eminent men of letters in the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or familiarity. It runs as follows:
Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equaled to their empire. Imperium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in the former sæculum), Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry, Earl of Surry, Chal-oner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were, for their times, admirable; and the more because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicholas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. The Earl of Essex, noble and high, and Sir Walter Raleigh not to be contemned, either for judgment or style. Sir Henry Saville, grave and truly lettered. Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent in both. Lord Egerton, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked. But his learned and able, but unfortunate successor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. * In short, within this view, and about this time, were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows backward. So that he may be so named and stand as the mark and ———— of our language. **
* Judge Holmes ("Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition,p. 650) italicises these words to point the allusion toBacon, and to notice that the passage in "The Discoveries,"immediately preceding the above, is a direct allusion toBacon, while the phrase "insolent Greece and haughtyRome" occurs in line thirty-nine of the verses eulogistic ofWilliam Shakespeare.** "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter: asthey have flowed out of his Daily Readings, or had theirReflux to his Peculiar Notion of the Time." By Ben Jonson."Works," by Peter Whalley, vol. vii., p. 99.
Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had published the verses whichmadeWilliam Shakespeare. Only fourteen years before he had asserted—what the world has taken his word for, and never questioned from that day to this—that his "best beloved" William Shakespeare had been the "soul of the age"—"not for an age, but for all time"—and his works "such as neither man nor muse can praise too much!" We have no means of knowing the precise date at which Ben Jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled,and his feelings experienced a change. But he leaves behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoranda, this catalogue "of all the wits" living in his day, who, in his opinion, "could honour a language or help study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare, the name—not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that—only, about fourteen years ago—he had deemed worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence concerning William Shakespeare, the passage we have quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon-son himself. But they are not silent. They devote a whole paragraph to William Shakespeare—but in the proper place; that is to say, not among "the wits who could honour a language or help study," but among the author's personal acquaintance. This is all there is of this paragraph as to the real William Shakespeare:
I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "would he had blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, 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 phantasie, 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 that 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 never did 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 pardoned.*
That is every word which a man who "loved him" could say of William Shakespeare!—that he was a skilled and careful penman, "never blotting out a line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to be checked; that, in playing the part of Cæsar on the stage, somebody interpolated the speech, "Cæsar, thou dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response; ** and that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand Shakespearean lines!—a thousand of the priceless lines of the peerless book we call "Shakespeare!"
* "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91.** Possibly this may have occurred in playing the veryversion of the "Cæsar" we now possess, though there are, ofcourse, no such lines to be found there.
Fancy the storm which would follow such a vandal proposition to-day! Ben Jonson does not specifywhichthousand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of the writings of his "soul of the age," the man "not of an age, but for all time!" And yet it is on the uncorroborated word of this man Jonson that we build monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel about the spelling of his name! If there is not astrong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of the day (we have history as authority for that), was poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to Shakespeare; he was a stock actor on the rich managers boards, and could not take the bread out of his own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert fling at the rich charlatan:
"Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not bettered much,
Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age:
Or purchase your delight at such a rate
As for it, he himself must justly hate.
To make a child now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed—
Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords
And help of some few foot and half foot words—
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars!
He [that is, Ben himself] rather prays you will be pleased to see
One such to-day, as other plays should be;
[that is, one he wrote himself]
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please."
Ben says this himself—in the prologue to his "Every Man in his Humour."
Again, in the "Induction" to his "BartholomewFair," he has this fling at "The Tempest:"
"If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it," he says, "nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." *
* "The Tempest" of that day in William Shakespeare's hands,then, was a "drollery." See some curious evidence going toprove that, while the titles of the plays always remain thesame, the plays themselves may have been different atdifferent times. 'post VI, "The New Theory." Dr. Carl Elze(Essays on Shakespeare. London. Macmillans. 1874), thinksthat Jonson meant a hit at Shakespeare when he says, inVolpone, "all our English authors will steal."
But that Jonson never himself believed, or expressed himself as believing, that William Shakespeare was a poet (except in this rhymed panegyric which Heminges and Condell prefixed to the first folio), there is still further and perhaps stronger proof. Three years after William Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson paid a visit to William Drummond of Hawthornden, and spent with him the greater part of the month of April, 1019 (or, as some fix it, the month of January, in that year). Drummond was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poetical reputation was what had attracted Jonson to make the visit. At any rate, he did visit him, and Drummond kept notes of Jonson's conversation. These notes are in the form of entries or items, grouped under Drummond's own headings or titles, such as: "his acquaintance and behavior with poets living with him."
Daniel was at jealousies with him.
Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him.
That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses.That Sir John Roe loved him; and when they, too, were ushered by my Lord Sullblk from a mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle to him which began:That next to Playes, the Court and the State were the best. God threateneth Kings, Kings Lords, (as) Lords do us.
He beat Marston and took his pistol from him.
Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected him, because a friend to Drayton.
That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly.
Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall.
That Markam (who added his Arcadia) was not of the number of the Faithfull, (i. e), Poets, and but a base fellow.
That such were Day and Middleton.
That Chapman and Fletcher were loved by him.
Overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie. etc., etc.
There are, in all, between two and three hundred entries of a similar character. Now, in one of these entries, Jonson is represented as saying that he "esteemeth Done the first poet in the world in some things;" but there is nothing put in Jonson's month, in the whole category, about the "Star of Poets," save that, in another place, is the following item:
"That Shakspeer wanted arte," and, further on, the following:
"Shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, when there is no see neer by some 100 miles." *
* Works of Ben Jonson. By William Gifford. Edited by Lt.Col. Francis Cunningham. Vol. III., p. 470. London. I. C.Hotten, 74 & 75 Picadilly.
These notes were first printed by Mr. David Laing, who discovered them among the manuscripts of SirRobert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physician of Edinburgh. They were preserved in the form of a copy in Sibbald's handwriting. Sibbald was a friend of the Bishop Sage, who edited Drummond's works in 1711. These notes were believed by Sir Walter Scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were printed first in the "Archaeological Scotica," in or about 1723. At any rate, they were never printed by Sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which suggested a motive for forgery, and, internally, they agree with Ben Jonson's own "Discoveries," especially as to his (Jonson's) estimate of William Shakespeare.
And yet Ben Johnson was the beneficiary and friend of William Shakespeare—the "immortal Shakespeare"—whom Ben "honoursthis sideidolatry," but whom we are not fearful of passing the bounds of idolatry in worshiping to-day. Ben Johnson was an overworked rhymester, and made his rhymes do double and treble duty. The first couplet of the prologue just cited
" Though need make many poets, and some such
As art and nature have not bettered much"—
needs only a little hammering over to become the
"While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much"—
of the mortuary verses which—as we say—made Shakespeare Shakespeare. When the rich manager's alleged works were to be collected, the poor scholar, who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was called upon for a tribute. But the poor scholar forbore to draw on the storehouse of his wits, though willing: to hammer over some of his old verses for the occasion. He once assured posterity, in rhyme, that they must not "give nature all," but remember his gentle Shakespeare's art, how he would "sweat and strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil" (in other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his genius to artificial perfection). And yet he deliberately tells Drummond, long years after, and puts it down in black and white over his own. signature, that this same Shakespeare "wanted art," and that the great trouble with him was that he talked too much. Is it possible that the ideal Shakespeare, the mighty miracle-working demigod, is only the accidental creation of a man who was poking fun at a shadow? Let us not proceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious consideration of Mr. Ben Jonson's unimpassioned prose.
If the paragraph from the "Discoveries" last above quoted—which estimates William Shakespeare precisely as history estimates him, namely, as a clever fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters in London—is not to be regarded as a confession that Ben Jonson's verses were written (or rewritten) more out of generosity to his late friend's memory—rather in the exuberance of a poetic license of apotheosis—than with a literal adherence to truth;* then it must be conceded that the result is such a facing both ways ashangs any Jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium as to the Shakespearean controversy, and entitles Ben Jonson himself, as a witness for anybody or to any thing, to simply step down and out.
* A confession, say the Baconians, that Jonson, as long asBacon lived, was eager to serve him by shouldering on hisincognito—in poetry—while he was under no compunction todo so in his own posthumous remains. See post V, TheBaconian Theory.
For, admitting that his poetry is just as good as his prose—and probably the Shakespeareans would care to assert no more than that—it is a legal maxim that a witness who swears for both sides swears for neither; and a rule of common law no less than of common sense that his evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be called upon to believe and disbelieve one and the same witness at the same time. And so we are relieved from accounting for the "Jonson testimony," as did Lord Palmerston, by saying: "O, those fellows always hang together; or, its just possible Jonson may have been deceived like the rest;" * or by asking ourselves if a score of rhymes by Ben Johnson, a fellow craftsman (not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropical or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi)—are to outweigh all historic certainty? If Jonson had written a life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of William Shakespeare, it might have been different. But he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical eulogy; and fact is one thing, and poetry—unless there is an exception in this instance—is conceded to be altogether another.
* Frazer's Magazine, November, 1865, p. 666.
But since numberless good people are suspicious of rules of law as applied to evidence, regarding them as over-nice, finical, and as framed rather to keep out truth than to let it in, let-us waive the legal maxim,and admit the Jonsonian testimony to be one single, consistent block of contemporary evidence. But, no sooner do we do this, than we find ourselves straightway floundering in a slough of absurdities for greater, it seems to us, than any we have yet encountered. To illustrate: It is necessary to the Shakespearean theory that in the days of Elizabeth and James there should have been not only aman, but a genius, a wit, and a poet, of the name of William Shakespeare; and that all these—man, genius, wit, and poet—should have been one and the same individual. Taking all the Jonsonian testimony, prose and poetry, together, such an individual there was, and his name was William Shakespeare, as required. But—still following Jonson's authority—at the same period and in the same town of London there was a certain gentleman named Bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had, moreover, "filled up all numbers—and" in the same days "performed that which may be compared either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." We have, then, not only a "wit and poet" named Shakespeare, but a "wit and poet" named Bacon; and, since Jonson is nowhere too modest to admit that he himself was a "wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually not one but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in London, in the golden age of English literature. We have already seen that, of this trio, two—Bacon and Shakespeare, if we are to believe the Shakespeareans—were personally unknown to each other. It is worth our while to pause right here, and see what this statement involves.
They are all three—Bacon, Jonson, and Shakespeare—dwelling in the same town at the same moment; are, all three, writers and wits, earning their living by their pens. Ben Jonson is the mutual friend. He is of service to both—he translates Bacon's English into Latin for him, * and writes plays for William Shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he ultimately becomes the Boswell of both, and runs from one to the other in rapture.
* Jonson assisted Dr. Hackett, afterward Bishop ofLitchfield and Coventry, in translating the essays of LordBacon into Latin. (Whalley, "Life of Ben Jonson," Vol. I. ofworks, cited ante.) Jonson was at this time "on terms ofintimacy with Lord Bacon."—(W. H. Smith, "Bacon andShakespeare," p. 29.)
His admiration for Bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose), amounts to a passion; his admiration for Shakespeare, on the other hand (according to his poetry), amounts to a passion, he declares (in prose) that Bacon "hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared and preferred either toinsolent Greece or haughty Rome." He declares (in poetry) of Shakespeare that he may be left alone—
"....for comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Borne
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come."
And yet he never, while going from one to the other, mentions Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any "order" to his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that this absolutely inimitable Bacon (who has surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness the masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare(who has likewise surpassed insolent Greece and haughty Rome); this Boswell of a Jonson, go-between of two men of repute and public character, travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each to the world outside (using the same figures of speech for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two public characters themselves each is absolutely ignorant of the other's existence! And yet they ought to have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any extent. Persons there have been who asserted, as we shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their writings, that Bacon and "Shakespeare" were one and the same man, and that what appeared to be "parallelisms" and coincidences in Bacon and "Shakespeare" were thus to be accounted for. But, admitting their separate identity, it is certain either that the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the natural philosopher; either of which looks very much like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we shall see further on, * some of these "parallelisms" are not coincidences, but something very likeidentities.
* Post, part V, The Baconian Theory.
It will not lighten this new difficulty to rule out the prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not annihilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare from their places in history. If, however, the Jonsonian poetrywerewiped out, the Jonsonian prose would receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows:At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are living, unknown to each other respectively, in London, there also dwell there three other gentlemen—Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well-known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen of elegant tastes—poets, men about town, critics—who, if the town were being convulsed by the production at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as to the circumstance. We do not add to this list Southampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, because these latter have left no memorandum or chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript behind them. But the first four have left just precisely such memoranda of their times as are of assistance to us here. Bacon, in his "Apothegms," Spenser in his poems, * and Raleigh and Matthew in their remains—especially Matthew—who, like Bacon, kept a diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson himself—appear to have stumbled on no trace of such a character as "Shakespeare" in all their sauntering about London.
* Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Homeagain," written in 1591, are:And there, though last not least, is Ætion,A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,Doth—life himself—heroically sound.""Æton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in theverse for "Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine howthis can possibly be more than mere speculation, sinceSpenser certainly left no annotation explanatory of thepassage, and it does not identify itself as a reference toShakespeare. In "The Tears of the Muses," line 205, there isan allusion which on a first glance appears so pat, that theBard of Avon has long been called "our pleasant Willy" onthe strength of it. It runs:"And ho, the man whom Nature's self had made, To mockherself and truth to imitateWith kindly counter under mimick shade,Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late:With whom all joy and jolly merriment Is also deaded, and indolour dreut."But, since Spenser died some seventeen years beforeShakespeare, and if—as must be supposed from theirflippancy—these lines point to the enforced or voluntaryretirement or silence of some writer, rather than to hisdeath—they appear more nearly to refer to Sidney than toShakespeare. And this now appears to be conceded. (SeeMorley's "English Men of Letters: Spenser," by Dean Church.American edition, Harpers, New York, 1879, p. 106.) Besides,"The Tears of the Muses" was written in 1580, whenShakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses at thetheater door. "Will," or "WiB," appears to have been theordinary nickname of a poet in those days.—R. Gr. White's"Shakespeare," vol. i., p. 57, note.
Especially on one occasion does Sir Tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if there had been any "Shakespeare" within his ken, he could very properly—and would, we think, very naturally—have mentioned him. In the "Address to the Reader," prefixed to one of his works, * he says, speaking of his own date, "We have also rare compositions made among us which look so many fair ways at once that I doubt it will go near to pose any other nations of Europe to muster out in any age four men who, in so many respects, should be able to excelfour such us we are able to show—Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. For they were all a kind of monsters in their various ways," etc.
* "A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Matthew, witha Character of the Most Excellent Lady Lucy, Countess ofCarlisle. To which are added Many Letters of his SeveralPersons of Honour, who were contemporary with him." Loudon,1660.
Besides, these four—or, dismissing Spenser, who was a poet exclusively—then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and Tobie Matthew—however else dissimilar, were any thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men of the court and of the world. They mingled among their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what they met and saw during their careers. They both live and move in the very town and in the very days when this rare poetry which Emerson says "the greatest minds value most" was appearing. But, if William Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it possible to escape the conviction that not one of them all—not Bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of antique not only, but of living and contemporary literature, and overfond of writing down his impressions for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr. Grant White says they were, some morsel of them must have reached his ear or eye)—not Raleigh, courtier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals)—not Tobie Matthew, who was all this latter with less of responsibility and mental balance—ever so much as heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned? That not one of these ever heard of a name that was in everybody's mouth—of a living man so famous that, as we shall presently consider, booksellers were using his name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill-ins: the most fashionable theater in London from cockpit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that the great Queen Elizabeth herself stepped down from the throne and walked across his stage to do him honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was to write an autograph letter (for these must all be considered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the King James story is only one of the "yarns," * cooked for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor—in orthodox procession from "might have been" to "was"—and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle incredible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any and every fable in this connection rather than accept the truth of history! To be sure, it is not absolutely impossible that these three men should have been cognizant of William Shakespeare's existence without mentioning him in their favors to posterity.