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?