The Valet's Tragedy, and Other Studies

The mythological legends were ‘in the air,’ familiar to all the Elizabethan world. These allusions are certainly no proof ‘of trained scholarship or scientific education.’ In five years of contact with the stage, with wits, with writers for the stage, with older plays, with patrons of the stage, with Templars, and so on, a man of talent could easily pick up the ‘general information’ – now caviare to the general – which a genius like Shakespeare inevitably absorbed.

We naturally come to Greene’s allusion to ‘Shakescene’ (1592), concerning which a schoolboy said, in an examination, ‘We are tired to death with hearing about it.’ Greene conspicuously insults ‘Shakescene’ both as a writer and an actor. Judge Webb says: ‘As Mr. Phillipps justly observes, it’ (one of Greene’s allusions) ‘merely conveys that Shakspere was one who acted in the plays of which Greene and his three friends were the authors (ii. 269).’

It is necessary to verify the Judge’s reference. Mr. Phillipps writes: ‘Taking Greene’s words in their contextual and natural sense, he first alludes to Shakespeare as an actor, one “beautified with our feathers,” that is, one who acts in their plays; THEN TO THE POET as a writer just commencing to try his hand at blank verse, and, finally, to him as not only engaged in both those capacities, but in any other in which he might be useful to the company.’ Mr. Phillipps adds that Greene’s quotation of the line ‘TYGER’S HEART WRAPT IN A PLAYER’S HIDE’ ‘is a decisive proof of Shakespeare’s authorship of the line.‘*

*Webb, p. 57. Phillipps, ii. p. 269.

Judge Webb has manifestly succeeded in not appreciating Mr. Phillipps’s plain English. He says, with obvious truth, that Greene attacks Shakespeare both as actor and poet, but Judge Webb puts the matter thus: ‘The language of Greene… as Mr. Phillipps justly observes, merely conveys that Shakspere was one who acted in the plays of which Greene and his three friends were authors.’

The language of Greene IN ONE PART OF HIS TIRADE, ‘an upstart crow beautified in our feathers,’ probably refers to Shakespeare as an actor only, but Greene goes on to insult him as a writer. Judge Webb will not recognise him as a writer, and omits that part of Mr. Phillipps’s opinion.

There followed Chettle’s well-known apology (1592), as editor of Greene’s sally, to Shakespeare. Chettle speaks of his excellence ‘in the quality he professes,’ and of his ‘facetious grace in writing, that approves his art,’ this on the authority of ‘the report of divers of worship.’

This proves, of course, that Shakespeare was a writer as well as an actor, and Judge Webb can only murmur that ‘we are “left to guess” who divers of worship’ were, and ‘what motive’ they had for praising his ‘facetious grace in writing.’ The obvious motive was approval of the work, for work there WAS, and, as to who the ‘divers’ were, nobody knows.

The evidence that, IN THE OPINION OF GREENE, CHETTLE, AND ‘DIVERS OF WORSHIP,’ Shakespeare was a writer as well as an actor is absolutely irrefragable. Had Shakespeare been the ignorant lout of the Baconian theorists, these men would not have credited him, for example, with his first signed and printed piece, ‘Venus and Adonis.’ It appeared early in 1593, and Greene and Chettle wrote in 1592. ‘Divers of worship,’ according to the custom of the time, may have seen ‘Venus and Adonis’ in manuscript. It was printed by Richard Field, a Stratford-on-Avon man, as was natural, a Stratford-on-Avon man being the author.* It was dedicated, in stately but not servile courtesy, to the Earl of Southampton, by ‘William Shakespeare.’

*Phillipps, i. p. 101.

Judge Webb asks: ‘Was it a pseudonym, or was it the real name of the author of the poem?’ Well, Shakespeare signs ‘Shakspere’ in two deeds, in which the draftsman throughout calls him ‘Shakespeare:’ obviously taking no difference.* People were not particular, Shakespeare let them spell his name as best pleased them.

*Phillipps, ii. pp. 34, 36.

Judge Webb argues that Southampton ‘took no notice’ of the dedication. How can he know? Ben Jonson dedicated to Lady Wroth and many others. Does Judge Webb know what ‘notice’ they took? He says that on various occasions ‘Southampton did not recognise the existence of the Player.’ How can he know? I have dedicated books to dozens of people. Probably they ‘took notice,’ but no record thereof exists. The use of arguments of this kind demonstrates the feebleness of the case.

That Southampton, however, DID ‘take notice’ may be safely inferred from the fact that Shakespeare, in 1594, dedicated to him ‘The Rape of Lucrece.’ Had the Earl been an ungrateful patron, had he taken no notice, Shakespeare had Latin enough to act on the motto Invenies alium si te hic fastidit Alexin. He speaks of ‘the warrant I have of your honourable disposition,’ which makes the poem ‘assured of acceptance.’ This could never have been written had the dedication of ‘Venus and Adonis’ been disdained. ‘The client never acknowledged his obligation to the patron,’ says Judge Webb. The dedication of ‘Lucrece’ is acknowledgment enough. The Judge ought to think so, for he speaks, with needless vigour, of ‘the protestations, warm and gushing as a geyser, of “The Rape.”’ There is nothing ‘warm,’ and nothing ‘gushing,’ in the dedication of ‘Lucrece’ (granting the style of the age), but, if it were as the Judge says, here, indeed, would be the client’s ‘acknowledgment,’ which, the Judge says, was never made.* To argue against such logic seems needless, and even cruel, but judicial contentions appear to deserve a reply.

Webb, p. 67.

We now come to the evidence of the Rev. Francis Meres, in ‘Palladis Tamia’ (1598). Meres makes ‘Shakespeare among the English’ the rival, in comedy and tragedy, of Plautus and Seneca ‘among the Latines.’ He names twelve plays, of which ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ is unknown. ‘The soul of Ovid’ lives in his ‘Venus and Adonis,’ his ‘Lucrece,’ and his ‘sugred sonnets among his private friends.’ Meres also mentions Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and so forth, a long string of English poetic names, ending with ‘Samuel Page, sometime Fellow of C.C.C. in Oxford, Churchyard, Bretton.‘*

*Phillipps, ii. pp. 149,150.

Undeniably Meres, in 1598, recognises Shakespeare as both playwright and poet. So Judge Webb can only reply: ‘But who this mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare was he does not say, AND HE DOES NOT PRETEND TO KNOW.‘* He does not ‘pretend to know’ ‘who’ any of the poets was – except Samuel Page, and he was a Fellow of Corpus. He speaks of Shakespeare just as he does of Marlowe, Kid, Chapman, and the others whom he mentions. He ‘does not pretend to know who’ they were. Every reader knew who they all were. If I write of Mr. Swinburne or Mr. Pinero, of Mr. Browning or of Mr. Henry Jones, I do not say ‘who they were,’ I do not ‘pretend to know.’ There was no Shakespeare in the literary world of London but the one Shakespeare, ‘Burbage’s deserving man.’

*Webb, p. 71.

The next difficulty is that Shakespeare’s company, by request of the Essex conspirators (who paid 2 pounds), acted ‘Richard II.’ just before their foolish attempt (February 7, 1601). ‘If Coke,’ says the Judge, ‘had the faintest idea that the player’ (Shakespeare) ‘was the author of “Richard II.,” he would not have hesitated a moment to lay him by the heels.’ Why, the fact of Shakespeare’s authorship had been announced, in print, by Meres, in 1598. Coke knew, if he cared to know. Judge Webb goes on: ‘And that the Player’ (Shakespeare) ‘was not regarded as the author by the Queen is proved by the fact that, with his company, he performed before the Court at Richmond, on the evening before the execution of the Earl.‘*

*Webb, pp. 72, 73.

Nothing of the kind is proved. The guilt, if any, lay, not in writing the drama – by 1601 ‘olde and outworne’ – but in acting it, on the eve of an intended revolution. This error Elizabeth overlooked, and with it the innocent authorship of the piece, ‘now olde and outworne.‘* It is not even certain, in Mr. Phillipps’s opinion, that the ‘olde and outworne’ play was that of Shakespeare. It is perfectly certain that, as Elizabeth overlooked the fault of the players, she would not attack the author of a play written years before Essex’s plot, with no political intentions.

*Phillipps, ii. pp. 359-362.

We now come to evidence of which Judge Webb says very little, that of the two plays acted at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1600-1601, known as ‘The Returne from Parnassus.’ These pieces prove that Shakespeare the poet was identified with Shakespeare the player. They also prove that Shakespeare’s scholarship and art were held very cheaply by the University wits, who, as always, were disdainful of non-University men. His popularity is undisputed, but his admirer in the piece, Gullio, is a vapouring ignoramus, who pretends to have been at the University of Padua, but knows no more Latin than many modern critics. Gullio rants thus: ‘Pardon, faire lady, though sicke-thoughted Gullio makes amaine unto thee, and LIKE A BOULD-FACED SUTOR ‘GINS TO WOO THEE.’ This, of course, is from ‘Venus and Adonis.’ Ingenioso says, aside: ‘We shall have nothinge but pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theaters.’ Gullio next mouths a reminiscence of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and Ingenioso whispers, ‘Marke, Romeo and Juliet, O monstrous theft;’ however, aloud, he says ‘Sweete Mr. Shakspeare!’ – the spelling varies. Gullio continues to praise sweete Mr. Shakspeare above Spenser and Chaucer. ‘Let mee heare Mr. Shakspear’s veyne.’ Judge Webb does not cite these passages, which identify Shakspeare (or Shakespeare) with the poet of ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

In the second ‘Returne,’ Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and clown of Shakespeare’s company, are introduced. ‘Few of the University men pen plays well,’ says Kemp; ‘they smack too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare’ (fellow is used in the sense of companion), ‘puts them all downe, ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’ At Burbage’s request, one of the University men then recites two lines of ‘Richard III.,’ by the poet of his company.

Ben, according to Judge Webb, ‘bewrayed his credit’ in ‘The Poetaster,’ 1601-1602, where Pantalabus ‘was meant for Shakspere.‘* If so, Pantalabus is described as one who ‘pens high, lofty, and in a new stalking strain,’ and if Shakespeare is the Poet Ape of Jonson’s epigram, why then Jonson regards him as a writer, not merely as an actor. No amount of evil that angry Ben could utter about the plays, while Shakespeare lived, and, perhaps, was for a time at odds with him, can obliterate the praises which the same Ben wrote in his milder mood. The charge against Poet Ape is a charge of plagiarism, such as unpopular authors usually make against those who are popular. Judge Webb has to suppose that Jonson, when he storms, raves against some ‘works’ at that time somehow associated with Shakespeare; and that, when he praises, he praises the divine masterpieces of Bacon. But we know what plays really were attributed to Shakespeare, then as now, while no other ‘works’ of a contemptible character, attributed to Shakespeare, are to be heard of anywhere. Judge Webb does not pretend to know what the things were to which the angry Jonson referred.** If he really aimed his stupid epigram at Shakespeare, he obviously alluded to the works which were then, and now are, recognised as Shakespeare’s; but in his wrath he denounced them. ‘Potter is jealous of potter, poet of poet’ – it is an old saying of the Greek. There was perhaps some bitterness between Jonson and Shakespeare about 1601; Ben made an angry epigram, perhaps against Shakespeare, and thought it good enough to appear in his collected epigrams in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. By that time the application to Shakespeare, if to him the epigram applied, might, in Ben’s opinion perhaps, be forgotten by readers. In any case, Ben, according to Drummond of Hawthornden, was one who preferred his jest to his friend.

*Webb, pp. 114-116.

**Webb, pp. 116-119.

Judge Webb’s hypothesis is that Ben, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, especially in 1600-1601, spoke evil of his works, though he allowed that they might endure to ‘after-times’ —

                              Aftertimes          May judge it to be his, as well as ours.

But these works (wholly unknown) were not (on the Judge’s theory) the works which, after Shakespeare’s death, Ben praised, as his, in verse; and, more critically, praised in prose: the works, that is, which the world has always regarded as Shakespeare’s. THESE were Bacon’s, and Ben knew it on Judge Webb’s theory. Here Judge Webb has, of course, to deal with Ben’s explicit declarations, in the First Folio, that the works which he praises are by Shakespeare. The portrait, says Ben,

          Was for gentle Shakespeare cut.

Judge Webb then assures us, to escape this quandary, that ‘in the Sonnets “the gentle Shakespeare himself informs us that Shakespeare was not his real name, but the “noted weed” in which he “kept invention.”’ * The author of the Sonnets does nothing of the kind. Judge Webb has merely misconstrued his text. The passage which he so quaintly misinterprets occurs in Sonnet lxxvi.:

      Why is my verse so barren of new pride?         So far from variation or quick change?      Why, with the time, do I not glance aside         To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?WHY WRITE I STILL ALL ONE, EVER THE SAME,AND KEEP INVENTION IN A NOTED WEED,THAT EVERY WORD DOES ALMOST TELL MY NAME,SHOWING THEIR BIRTH AND WHENCE THEY DO PROCEED?      Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you,         And you and love are still my argument;      So all my best is dressing old words new,         Spending again what is already spent:             For as the sun is daily new and old,             So is my love still telling what is told.

*Webb, pp. 125,156,235,264. Judge Webb is fond of his discovery.

The lines capitalised are thus explained by the Judge: ‘Here the author certainly intimates that Shakespeare is not his real name, and that he was fearful lest his real name should be discovered.’ The author says nothing about Shakespeare not being his real name, nor about his fear lest his real name should be discovered. He even ‘quibbles on his own Christian name,’ WILL, as Mr. Phillipps and everyone else have noted. What he means is: ‘Why am I so monotonous that every word almost tells my name?’ ‘To keep invention in a noted weed’ means, of course, to present his genius always in the same well-known attire. There is nothing about disguise of a name, or of anything else, in the sonnet.*

*Webb, pp. 64,156.

But Judge Webb assures us that Shakespeare himself informs us in the sonnets that ‘Shakespeare was not his real name, but the noted weed in which he kept invention.’ As this is most undeniably not the case, it cannot aid his effort to make out that, in the Folio, by the name of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson means another person.

In the Folio verses, ‘To the Memory of my Beloved, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What he has Left Us,’ Judge Webb finds many mysterious problems.

                              Soul of the Age,          The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,                    My Shakespeare, rise!

By a pun, Ben speaks of Shakespeare as

                              shaking a lance          As brandish’t at the eyes of Ignorance.

The pun does not fit the name of – Bacon! The apostrophe to ‘sweet Swan of Avon’ hardly applies to Bacon either; he was not a Swan of Avon. It were a sight, says Ben, to see the Swan ‘in our waters yet appear,’ and Judge Webb actually argues that Shakespeare was dead, and could not appear, so somebody else must be meant! ‘No poet that ever lived would be mad enough to talk of a swan as YET appearing, and resuming its flights, upon the river some seven or eight years after it was dead.‘* The Judge is like the Scottish gentleman who when Lamb, invited to meet Burns’s sons, said he wished it were their father, solemnly replied that this could not be, for Burns was dead. Wordsworth, in a sonnet, like Glengarry at Sheriffmuir, sighed for ‘one hour of Dundee!’ The poet, and the chief, must have been mad, in Judge Webb’s opinion, for Dundee had fallen long ago, in the arms of victory. A theory which not only rests on such arguments as Judge Webb’s, but takes it for granted that Bacon might be addressed as ‘sweet Swan of Avon,’ is conspicuously impossible.

*Webb, p. 134.

Another of the Judge’s arguments reposes on a misconception which has been exposed again and again. In his Memorial verses Ben gives to Shakespeare the palm for POETRY: to Bacon for ELOQUENCE, in the ‘Discoveries.’ Both may stand the comparison with ‘insolent Greece or haughty Rome.’ Shakespeare is not mentioned with Bacon in the ‘Scriptorum Catalogus’ of the ‘Discoveries’: but no more is any dramatic author or any poet, as a poet. Hooker, Essex, Egerton, Sandys, Sir Nicholas Bacon are chosen, not Spenser, Marlowe, or Shakespeare. All this does not go far to prove that when Ben praised ‘the wonder of our stage,’ ‘sweet Swan of Avon,’ he meant Bacon, not Shakespeare.

When Judge Webb argued that in matters of science (‘falsely so called’) Bacon and Shakespeare were identical, Professor Tyrrell, of Trinity College, Dublin, was shaken, and said so, in ‘The Pilot.’ Professor Dowden then proved, in ‘The National Review,’ that both Shakespeare and Bacon used the widely spread pseudo-scientific ideas of their time (as is conspicuously the case), and Mr. Tyrrell confessed that he was sorry he had spoken. ‘When I read Professor Dowden’s article, I would gladly have recalled my own, but it was too late.’ Mr. Tyrrell adds, with an honourable naivete, ‘I AM NOT VERSED IN THE LITERATURE OF THE SHAKESPEAREAN ERA, and I assumed that the Baconians who put forward the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences were peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet. Professor Dowden has proved that this is not so…’ Professor Dowden has indeed proved, in copious and minute detail, what was already obvious to every student who knew even such ordinary Elizabethan books as Lyly’s ‘Euphues’ and Phil Holland’s ‘Pliny,’ and the speculations of such earlier writers as Paracelsus. Bacon and Shakespeare, like other Elizabethans, accepted the popular science of their period, and decorated their pages with queer ideas about beasts, and stones, and plants; which were mere folklore. A sensible friend of my own was staggered, if not converted, by the parallelisms adduced in Judge Webb’s chapter ‘Of Bacon as a Man of Science.’ I told him that the parallelisms were Elizabethan commonplaces, and were not peculiar to Bacon and Shakespeare. Professor Dowden, out of the fulness of his reading, corroborated this obiter dictum, and his article (in ‘The National Review,’ vol. xxxix., 1902) absolutely disposes of the Judge’s argument.

Mr. Tyrrell went on: ‘The evidence of Ben Jonson alone seems decisive of the question; the other’ (the Judge, for one) ‘persuades himself (how, I cannot understand) that it may be explained away.‘*

*Pilot, August 30, 1902, p. 220.

We have seen how Judge Webb ‘explains away’ the evidence of Ben. But while people ‘not versed in the literature of the Shakespearean era’ assume that the Baconians have examined it, to discover whether Shakespearo-Baconian parallelisms are peculiar to these two writers or not, these people may fall into the error confessed by Mr. Tyrrell.

Some excuse is needed for arguing on the Baconian doctrine. ‘There is much doubt and misgiving on the subject among serious men,’ says Judge Webb, and if a humble author can, by luck, allay the doubts of a single serious man, he should not regret his labour.