Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown Part 7

Genius, says Mr. Morgan, "did not guide Burns's untaught pen to write of Troy or Egypt, of Athens and Cyprus." No! that was not Burns's lay; nor would he have found a public had he emulated the contemporary St. Andrews professor, Mr. Wilkie, who wrote The Epigoniad, and sang of Cadmeian Thebes, to the delight of David Hume, his friend. The public of 1780-90 did not want new epics of heroic Greece from Mossgiel; nor was the literature accessible to Burns full of the mediaeval legends of Troy and Athens. But the popular literature accessible to Will was full of the mediaeval legends of Thebes, Troy, and Athens; and of these, NOT of Homer, Will made his market. Egypt he knew only in the new English version of Plutarch's Lives; of Homer, he (or the author of Troilus and Cressida) used only Iliad VII., in Chapman's new translation (1598). For the rest he had Lydgate (perhaps), and, certainly, Caxton's Destruction of Troy, still reprinted as a POPULAR book as late as 1713. Will did not, as Mr. Morgan says, "reproduce the very counterfeit civilisations and manners of nations born and buried and pa.s.sed into history a thousand years before he had been begotten. . . " He bestowed the manners of mediaeval chivalrous romance on his Trojans and Greeks. He accommodated prehistoric Athens with a Duke. He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early; and made Cleopatra play at billiards.

Look at his notion of "the very manners" of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear! Concerning "the anomalous status of a King of Scotland under one of its primitive Kings" the author of Macbeth knew no more than what he read in Holinshed; of the actual truth concerning Duncan (that old prince was, in fact, a young man slain in a blacksmith's bothy), and of the whole affair, the author knew nothing but a tissue of sophisticated legends. The author of the plays had no knowledge (as Mr. Morgan inexplicably declares that he had) of "matters of curious and occult research for antiquaries or dilettanti to dig out of old romances or treaties or statutes rather than for historians to treat of or schools to teach!"

Mon Dieu! do historians NOT treat of "matters of curious research"

and of statutes and of treaties? As for "old romances," they were current and popular. The "occult" sources of King Lear are a popular tale attached to legendary "history" and a story in Sidney's Arcadia.

Will, whom Mr. Morgan describes as "a letterless peasant lad," or the Author, whoever he was, is not "invested with all the love" (sic, v.1. "lore"), "which the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and buried and forgotten."

"Our friend's style has flowery components," Mr. Greenwood adds to this deliciously eloquent pa.s.sage from his American author, "and yet Shakespeare who did all this," et caetera. But Shakespeare did NOT do "all this"! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it. Shakespeare does not go to Tighernach and the Hennskringla for Macbeth; or for Hamlet to the saga which is the source of Saxo; or for his English chronicle- plays to the State Papers. Shakespeare did not, like William of Deloraine, dig up "clasped books, buried and forgotten." There is no original research; the author uses the romances, novels, ballads, and popular books of uncritical history which were current in his day.

Mr. Greenwood knows that; Mr. Morgan, perhaps, knew it, but forgot what he knew; hurried away by the Muse of Eloquence. And the common Baconian may believe Mr. Morgan.

But Mr. Greenwood asks "what was the poetic output?" in Burns's case.

{100a} It was what we know, and THAT was what suited his age and his circ.u.mstances. It was lyric, idyll, song, and satire; it was not drama, for to the Stage he had no access, he who pa.s.sed but one winter in Edinburgh, where the theatre was not the centre of literature.

Shakespeare came, with genius and with such materials as I have suggested, to an entirely different market, the Elizabethan theatre.

I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all- pervading cla.s.sicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the cla.s.sics,--with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d'Arthur and Destruction of Troy.

I can agree with Mr. Greenwood, when he says that "Genius is a potentiality, and whether it will ever become an actuality, and what it will produce, depends upon the moral qualities with which it is a.s.sociated, and the opportunities that are open to it--in a word, on the circ.u.mstances of its environment." {101a}

Of course by "moral qualities," a character without spot or stain is not intended: we may take that for granted. Otherwise, I agree; and think that Shakespeare of Stratford had genius, and that what it produced was in accordance with the opportunities open to it, and with "the circ.u.mstances of its environment." Without the "environment," no Jeanne d'Arc,--without the environment, no Shakespeare.

To come to his own, Shakespeare needed the environment of "the light people," the crowd of wits living from hand to mouth by literature, like Greene and Nash; and he needed that pell-mell of the productions of their pens: the novels, the poems, the pamphlets, and, above all, the plays, and the wine, the wild talk, the wit, the travellers'

tales, the seamen's company, the vision of the Court, the gallants, the beauties; and he needed the People, of whom he does not speak in the terms of such a philanthropist as Bacon professedly was. Not as an aristocrat, a courtier, but as a simple literary man, William does not like, though he thoroughly understands, the mob. Like Alceste (in Le Misanthrope of Poquelin), he might say,

"L'Ami du genre humain n'est point du tout mon fait."

In London, not in Stratford, he could and did find his mob. This reminds one to ask, how did the Court-haunting, or the study- haunting, or law-court, and chamber of criminal examination-rooms haunting Bacon make acquaintance with Mrs. Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet, and drawers, and carters, and Bardolph, and Pistol, and copper captains, and all Shakespeare's crowd of people hanging loose on the town?

It is much easier to discover how Shakespeare found the tone and manners of courtly society (which, by the way, are purely poetic and conventional), than to find out where Bacon got his immense knowledge of what is called "low life."

If you reply, as regards Bacon, "his genius divined the Costards and Audreys, the Doll Tearsheets and tapsters, and drawers, and Bardolphs, and carters, from a hint or two, a glance," I answer that Will had much better sources for THEM in his own experience of life, and had conventional poetic sources for his courtiers--of whom, in the quick, he saw quite as much as Moliere did of his Marquis.

But one Baconian has found out a more excellent way of accounting for Bacon's pictures of rude rustic life, and he is backed by Lord Penzance, that aged Judge. The way is short. These pictures of rural life and character were interpolated into the plays of Bacon by his collaborator, William Shakspere, actor, "who prepared the plays for the stage." This brilliant suggestion is borrowed from Mr.

Appleton Morgan. {103a}

Thus have these two Baconians perceived that it IS difficult to see how Bacon obtained his knowledge of certain worlds and aspects of character which he could scarcely draw "from the life." I am willing to ascribe miracles to the genius of Bacon; but the Baconians cited give the honour to the actor, "who prepared the plays for the stage."

Take it as you please, my Baconian friends who do not believe as I believe in "Genius." Shakespeare and Moliere did not live in "Society," though both rubbed shoulders with it, or looked at it over the invisible barrier between the actor and the great people in whose houses or palaces he takes the part of Entertainer. The rest they divined, by genius.

Bacon did not, perhaps, study the society of carters, drawers, Mrs.

Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; of copper captains and their boys; not at Court, not in the study, did he meet them. How then did he create his mult.i.tude of very low-lived persons? Rustics and rural constables he MAY have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company. So you have to admit "Genius,"--the miracle of "Genius" in your Bacon,--to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.

Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says something about the humorist, and tradition, IN SIMILAR CIRc.u.mSTANCES, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.

Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged to a.s.sume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney. Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns did,--some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he a.s.sailed other deer, and was in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance. Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory. His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.

Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been attracted. He was a practical man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies. According to Ben Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that terrible bar! The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house as a "servitor"--a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.

By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, "Shakescene" thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene's three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.

Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say, five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with the stage. Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good deal of very mixed society--writing men, bookish young blades, young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the gallants.

What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize- fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact that he was a lord. Moreover there were no women on the stage to distract the attention of the gallants. The players, says Asinius Lupus, in Jonson's Poetaster, "corrupt young gentry very much, I know it." I take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. {106a} They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them.

From Ben's Poetaster, which bristles with envy of the players, Mr.

Greenwood also quotes a railing address by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor, "There are some of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha' some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests; AND ARE COMPANIONS FOR GALLANTS. A man may skelder ye, now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so." {107a} We think of Nigel Olifaunt in The Fortunes of Nigel; but better gallants might choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.

To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding of human nature. The players were, when unprotected by men of rank, "vagabonds." The citizens of London, mainly Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans. The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and great houses. The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights. Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge "Parna.s.sus" plays of c. 1600-2. In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted Dogberry in Shakespeare's company, and was in favour, says Heywood, with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: "For Londoners, who of more report than d.i.c.k Burbage and Will Kempe?

He is not counted a gentleman that knows not d.i.c.k Burbage and Will Kempe." It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be, as much "in Society" as is possible for a mere literary man. I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour. He was a man's man, a peer might be interested in him as easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que scais-je?

Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested, interested in a better way.

In such circ.u.mstances which are certainly in accordance with human nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome, popular Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested himself in the poet. There followed the dedication to the Earl of Venus and Adonis; a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).

Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate. The mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that of Lucrece, proves that the Earl did not share the surprise of Mr.

Greenwood. He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew the real concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym. But of the hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said.

Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have left any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.

This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair.

But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or "patronage" of Southampton "not a sc.r.a.p of evidence exists." {109a} Where would Mr.

Greenwood expect to find a sc.r.a.p of evidence? In literary anecdote?

Of contemporary literary anecdote about Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and Fletcher, there is none, or next to none. There is the tradition that Southampton gave the poet 1000 pounds towards a purchase to which he had a mind. (Rowe seems to have got this from Davenant,--through Betterton.) In what doc.u.ments would the critic expect to find a sc.r.a.p of evidence?

Perhaps in Southampton's book of his expenditure, and that does not exist. It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find him, poor as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.

As to the chances of an actor's knowing "smart people," Heywood, who knew all that world, tells us {109b} that "Tarleton, in his time, was gracious with the Queen, his sovereign," Queen Elizabeth. "Will Kempe was in the favour of his sovereign."

THEY had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians.

I am not pretending that, though his

"flights upon the banks of Thames So did take Eliza and our James,"

Will Shakspere "was gracious with the Queen."

We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. They have the audacity to say nothing about having asked and received permission to dedicate. They say that the Earls "have prosecuted both the plays and their authour living" (while in life) "with much favour." They "have collected and published the works of 'the dead' . . . only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow" (a.s.sociate) "as was our Shakespeare, 'your servant Shakespeare.'"

Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor's authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls held him. Mr. Greenwood {110a} supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains an allusion to a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny. Be that as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke and Montgomery. To THEM it cannot lie; THEY know whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or not, that the plays were their "servant's." How is Mr.

Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors, to the ident.i.ty of their late "Fellow" the player, with the author; and to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and his compositions?

Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which the players signed. {111a}

Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare, the dedication does not say in so many words. They had seen his plays and had "favoured" both him and them, with so much favour, had "used indulgence" to the author. That is not nearly explicit enough for the precise Baconians. But the Earls knew whether what was said were true or false. I am not sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been duped as to the authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian joke and mystery--that "William Shakespeare" the author is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written in legal doc.u.ments as "William Shakespeare."

Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere was acting in a company (1592-3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote Venus and Adonis, and, signing "W. Shakspeare," dedicated it to his young friend, the Earl, promising to add "some graver labour," a promise fulfilled in Lucrece. In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful Earl--the Earl of Ess.e.x, not of Southampton: to Ess.e.x he did not dedicate his two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were his). He "did nothing but ruminate" (he tells the world) on Ess.e.x. How Mr. Greenwood's Unknown was occupied in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.

I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as "Shakescene." There remains a difficulty. By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of THIRTEEN plays, or even of six. But I have not credited him with the authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, t.i.tus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, King John, the three plays of Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew. Mr. Greenwood {112a} cites Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of 1592 "some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written," and for Dr. Furnivall's opinion that eleven had been composed.

If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I should be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed, in these five years, by Will. Mr. Greenwood writes, "Some of the dates are disputable"; and, for himself, would omit "t.i.tus Andronicus, the three plays of Henry VI, and possibly also The Taming of the Shrew, while the reference to Hamlet also is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very doubtful force." {113a} This leaves us with six of Dr. Furnivall's list of earliest plays put out of action. The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous enough to stagger my credulity remain.

I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592-3 was the ex-butcher's boy. Meanwhile these five plays, written by somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr.

Greenwood's book {113b} with Dr. Furnivall's eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he be a "Stratfordian." "Will, even Will," says the Stratfordian, "could not have composed the five, much less the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed's thirteen 'before 1592.'" {113c} But, at the close of his work {113d} Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean plays "before 1592" as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of feu Mr. Bludyer of The Tomahawk.