Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet:

“Earth covers, Olympus” (heaven? or the Muses’ Hill?) “holds him who was a Nestor in counsel; in poetic art, a Virgil; a Socrates for his Dæmon” (“Genius”). As for the “Genius,” or dæmon of Socrates, and the permitted false quantity in making the first syllable of Socrates short; and the use of Olympus for heaven in epitaphs, it is sufficient to consult the learning of Mr. Elton. [137 - C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp. 236–237.] The poet who made such notable false quantities in his plays had no cause to object to another on his monument. We do not know who erected the monument, and paid for it, or who wrote or adapted the epitaph; but it was somebody who thought Shakespeare (or Bacon?) “a clayver man.” The monument (if a trembling conjecture may be humbly put forth) was conceivably erected by the piety of Shakespeare’s daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Hall. They exhibit a taste for the mortuary memorial and the queer Latin inscription. Mrs. Hall gratified the Manes of her poor mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, with one of the oddest of Latin epitaphs. [138 - C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, p. 228.] It opens like an epigram in the Greek Anthology, and ends in an unusual strain of Christian mysticism. Mr. Hall possesses, perhaps arranged for himself, a few Latin elegiacs as an epitaph.

The famous “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear,” and so on, on the stone in the chancel, beneath which the sacred dust of Shakespeare lies, or lay, is the first of “the last lines written, we are told,” [139 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199.] “by the author of Hamlet.” Who tells us that Shakespeare wrote the four lines of doggerel? Is it conceivable that the authority for Shakespeare’s authorship of the doggerel is a tradition gleaned by Mr. Dowdall of Queen’s in 1693, from a parish clerk, aged over eighty, he says, – criticism makes the clerk twenty years younger. [140 - C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp. 332–333.] For Baconians the lines are bad enough to be the work of William Shakspere of Stratford.

Meanwhile, in 1649, when Will’s daughter, Mrs. Hall, died, her epitaph spoke quite respectfully of her father’s intelligence.

“Witty above her sex, but that’s not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholly of Him with whom she’s now in bliss.” [141 - Ibid., p. 250.]

Thirty-three years after Shakespeare’s death he was still thought “witty” in Stratford. But what could Stratford know? Milton and Charles I were of the same opinion; so was Suckling, and the rest of the generation after Shakespeare. But they did not know, how should they, that Bacon (or his equivalent) was the genuine author of the plays and poems. The secret, perhaps, so widely spread among “the friends of the Muses” in 1616, was singularly well kept by a set of men rather given to blab as a general rule.

I confess to be passing weary of the Baconian hatred of Will, which pursues him beyond his death with sneers and fantastic suspicions about his monument and his grave, and asks if he “died with a curse upon his lips, an imprecation against any man who might move his bones? A mean and vulgar curse indeed!” [142 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 199, note 1.] And the authority for the circumstance that he died with a mean and vulgar curse upon his lips?

About 1694, a year after Mr. Dowdall in 1693, and eighty years almost after Shakespeare’s death, W. Hall, a Queen’s man, Oxford (the W. Hall, perhaps, who gave the Bodleian Aldine Ovid, with Shakespeare’s signature, true or forged, to its unknown owner), went to Stratford, and wrote about his pilgrimage to his friend Mr. Thwaites, a Fellow of Queen’s. Mr. Hall heard the story that Shakespeare was the author of the mean and vulgar curse. He adds that there was a great ossuary or bone-house in the church, where all the bones dug up were piled, “they would load a great number of waggons.” Not desiring this promiscuity, Shakespeare wrote the Curse in a style intelligible to clerks and sextons, “for the most part a very ignorant sort of people.”

If Shakespeare did, that accommodation of himself to his audience was the last stroke of his wisdom, or his wit. [143 - C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp. 339, 342.] Of course there is no evidence that he wrote the mean and vulgar curse: that he did is only the pious hope of the Baconians and Anti-Willians.

Into the question of the alleged portraits of Shakespeare I cannot enter. Ben spoke well of the engraving prefixed to the First Folio, but Ben, as Mr. Greenwood says, was anxious to give the Folio “a good send-off.” The engraving is choicely bad; we do not know from what actual portrait, if from any, it was executed. Richard Burbage is known to have amused himself with the art of design; possibly he tried his hand on a likeness of his old friend and fellow-actor. If so, he may have succeeded no better than Mary Stuart’s embroiderer, Oudry, in his copy of the portrait of her Majesty.

That Ben Jonson was painted by Honthorst and others, while Shakespeare, as far as we know, was not, has nothing to do with the authorship of the plays. Ben was a scholar, the darling of both Universities; constantly employed about the Court in arranging Masques; his learning and his Scottish blood may have led James I to notice him. Ben, in his later years, was much in society; fashionable and literary. He was the father of the literary “tribe of Ben.” Thus he naturally sat for his portrait. In the same way George Buchanan has, and had, nothing like the fame of Knox. But as a scholar he was of European reputation; haunted the Court as tutor of his King, and was the “good pen” of the anti-Marian nobles, Murray, Morton, and the rest. Therefore Buchanan’s portrait was painted, while of Knox we have only a woodcut, done, apparently, after his death, from descriptions, for Beza’s Icones. The Folio engraving may have no better source. Without much minute research it is hard to find authentic portraits of Mary Stuart, and, just as in Shakespeare’s case, [144 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 238.] the market, in her own day and in the eighteenth century, was flooded with “mock-originals,” not even derived (in any case known to me) from genuine and authentic contemporary works.

One thing is certain about the Stratford bust. Baconians will believe that Dugdale’s man correctly represented the bust as it was in his time; and that the actual bust is of 1748, in spite of proofs of Dugdale’s man’s fantastic inaccuracy; in spite of the evidence of style; and in spite of documentary evidence that “the original monument” was not to be destroyed and replaced by the actual monument, but was merely “repaired and beautified” (painted afresh) by a local painter.

X

“THE TRADITIONAL SHAKSPERE”

In perusing the copious arguments of the Anti-Shakesperean but Non-Baconian Mr. Greenwood, I am often tempted, in Socratic phrase, to address him thus: Best of men, let me implore you, first, to keep in memory these statements on which you have most eloquently and abundantly insisted, namely, that society in Stratford was not only not literary, but was illiterate. Next pardon me for asking you to remember that the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century did not resemble our fortunate age. Some people read Shakespeare’s, Beaumont’s, and Fletcher’s plays. This exercise is now very rarely practised. But nobody cared to chronicle literary gossip about the private lives and personal traits of these and several other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, in the modern manner. Of Shakespeare (pardon, I mean Shakspere), the actor, there is one contemporary anecdote, in my poor opinion a baseless waggery. Of Beaumont there is none. Of a hand-maid of Fletcher, who drank sack in a tumbler, one anecdote appears at the end of the seventeenth century, – nothing better. Meanwhile of Shakspere the “traditions” must be sought either at Stratford or in connection with the London Stage; and in both cases the traditions began to be in demand very late.

As Stratford was not literary, indeed was terribly illiterate, any traditions that survived cannot conceivably have been literary. That is absolutely certain. Natives at Stratford had, by your own hypothesis, scant interest in literary anecdote. Fifty years after Shakespeare’s death, no native was likely to cherish tales of any sprouts of wit (though it was remembered in 1649, that he was “witty”), or any “wood-notes wild,” which he may have displayed or chirped at an early age.

Such things were of no interest to Stratford. If he made a speech when he killed a calf, or poached, or ran away to town, the circumstance might descend from one gaffer to another; he might even be remembered as “the best of his family,” – the least inefficient. Given your non-literary and illiterate Stratford, and you can expect nothing more, and nothing better, than we receive.

Let me illustrate by a modern example. In 1866 I was an undergraduate of a year’s standing at Balliol College, Oxford, certainly not an unlettered academy. In that year, the early and the best poems of a considerable Balliol poet were published: he had “gone down” some eight years before. Being young and green I eagerly sought for traditions about Mr. Swinburne. One of his contemporaries, who took a First in the final Classical Schools, told me that “he was a smug.” Another, that, as Mr. Swinburne and his friend (later a Scotch professor) were not cricketers, they proposed that they should combine to pay but a single subscription to the Cricket Club. A third, a tutor of the highest reputation as a moralist and metaphysician, merely smiled at my early enthusiasm, – and told me nothing. A white-haired College servant said that “Mr. Swinburne was a very quiet gentleman.”

Then you take us to dirty illiterate Stratford, from fifty to eighty years after Shakspere’s death, – a Civil War and the Reign of the Saints, a Restoration and a Revolution having intervened, – and ask us to be surprised that no anecdotes of Shakspere’s early brilliance, a century before, survived at Stratford.

A very humble parallel may follow. Some foolish person went seeking early anecdotes of myself at my native town, Selkirk on the Ettrick. From an intelligent townsman he gathered much that was true and interesting about my younger brothers, who delighted in horses and dogs, hunted, shot, and fished, and played cricket; one of them bowled for Gloucestershire and Oxford. But about me the inquiring literary snipe only heard that “Andra was aye the stupid ane o’ the fam’ly.” Yet, I, too, had bowled for the local club, non sine gloria! Even that was forgotten.

Try to remember, best of men, that literary anecdotes of a fellow townsman’s youth do not dwell in the memories of his neighbours from sixty to a hundred years after date. It is not in human nature that what was incomprehensible to the grandsire should be remembered by the grandson. Go to “Thrums” and ask for literary memories of the youth of Mr. Barrie.

Yet [145 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214.] the learned Malone seems to have been sorry that little of Shakespeare but the calf-killing and the poaching, and the dying of a fever after drink taken (where, I ask you?), with Ben and Drayton, was remembered, so long after date, at Stratford, of all dirty ignorant places. Bah! how could these people have heard of Drayton and Ben? Remember that we are dealing with human nature, in a peculiarly malodorous and densely ignorant bourgade, where, however, the “wit” of Shakespeare was not forgotten (in the family) in 1649. See the epithet on the tomb of his daughter, Mrs. Hall.

You give us the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Stratford (1661–3), who has heard that the actor was “a natural wit,” and contracted and died of a fever, after a bout with Drayton and Ben. I can scarcely believe that these were local traditions. How could these rustauds have an opinion about “natural wit,” how could they have known the names of Ben and Drayton?

When you come to Aubrey, publishing in 1680, sixty years after Shakespeare’s death, you neglect to trace the steps in the descent of his tradition. As has been stated, Beeston, “the chronicle of the Stage” (died 1682), gave him the story of the school-mastering; Beeston being the son of a servitor of Phillips, an actor and friend of Shakespeare, who died eleven years before that player. The story of the school-mastering and of Shakespeare “knowing Latin pretty well,” is of no value to me. I think that he had some knowledge of Latin, as he must have had, if he were what I fancy him to have been, and if (which is mere hypothesis) he went for four years to a Latin School. But the story does not suit you, and you call it “a mere myth,” which, “of course, will be believed by those who wish to believe it.” But, most excellent of mortals, will it not, by parity of reasoning, “of course be disbelieved by those who do not wish to believe it”?

And do you want to believe it?

To several stage anecdotes of the actor as an excellent instructor of younger players, you refer slightingly. They do not weigh with me: still, the Stage would remember Shakspere (or Shakespeare) best in stage affairs. In reference to a very elliptic statement that, “in Hamlet Betterton benefited by Shakespeare’s coaching,” you write, “This is astonishing, seeing that Shakspere had been in his grave nearly twenty years when Betterton was born. The explanation is that Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, was, according to Sir William Davenant, instructed by Shakspere, and Davenant, who had seen Taylor act, according to Downes, instructed Betterton. There is a similar story about Betterton playing King Henry VIII. Betterton was said to have been instructed by Sir William, who was instructed by Lowen, who was instructed by Shakspere!” [146 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 214, note 2.]

Why a note of exclamation? Who was Downes, and what were his opportunities of acquiring information? He “was for many years book-keeper in the Duke’s Company, first under Davenant in the old house.. ” Davenant was notoriously the main link between “the first and second Temple,” the theatre of Shakespeare whom, as a boy, he knew, and the Restoration theatre. Devoted to the traditions of the stage, he collected Shakespearean and other anecdotes; he revived the theatre, cautiously, during the last years of Puritan rule, and told his stories to the players of the early Restoration. As his Book-keeper with the Duke of York’s Company, Downes heard what Davenant had to tell; he also, for his Roscius Anglicanus, had notes from Charles Booth, prompter at Drury Lane. On May 28, 1663, Davenant reproduced Hamlet, with young Betterton as the Prince of Denmark. Davenant, says Charles Booth, “had seen the part taken by Taylor, of the Black Fryars Company, and Taylor had been instructed by the author,” (not Bacon but) “Mr. William Shakespeare,” and Davenant “taught Mr. Betterton in every particle of it.” Mr. Elton adds, “We cannot be sure that Taylor was taught by Shakespeare himself. He is believed to have been a member of the King’s Company before 1613, and to have left it for a time before Shakespeare’s death.” [147 - C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, p. 56.] His name is in the list in the Folio of “the principall Actors in all these plays,” but I cannot pretend to be certain that he played in them in Will’s time.

It is Mr. Pepys (December 30, 1668) who chronicles Davenant’s splendid revival of Henry VIII, in which Betterton, as the King, was instructed by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old Mr. Lowen, that had his instruction “from Mr. Shakespear himself.” Lowin, or Lowen, joined Shakespeare’s Company in 1604, being then a man of twenty-eight. Burbage was the natural man for Hamlet and Henry VIII; but it is not unusual for actors to have “understudies.”

The stage is notoriously tenacious of such traditions.

When we come with you to Mr. W. Fulman, about 1688, and the additions to his notes made about 1690–1708, we are concerned with evidence much too remote, and, in your own classical style, “all this is just a little mixed.” [148 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 28, 29.] With what Mr. Dowdall heard in 1693, and Mr. William Hall (1694) heard from a clerk or sexton, or other illiterate dotard at Stratford, I have already dealt. I do not habitually believe in what I hear from “the oldest aunt telling the saddest tale,” – no, not even if she tells a ghost story, or an anecdote about the presentation by Queen Mary of her portrait to the ancestor of the Laird, – the portrait being dated 1768, and representing her Majesty in the bloom of girlhood. Nor do I care for what Rowe said (on Betterton’s information), in 1709, about Shakespeare’s schooling; nor for what Dr. Furnivall said that Plume wrote; nor for what anybody said that Sir John Mennes (Menzies?) said. But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare’s fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you explain away by ætiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.

What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was men’s impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly, and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare England could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623), not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664. The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after 1664 – and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless. What could have been picked up, by 1680–90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.

XI

THE FIRST FOLIO

“The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.

The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that all the contents are published “according to the true original copies.” If only MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), [149 - Like Mr. Greenwood, I think that Ben was the penman.] speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare’s friends “have collected and published” the plays, have so published them “that whereas you were abus’d with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: even those” (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced by pirates) “are now offered to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest” (that is, all the plays which had not been piratically debased), “absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.” So obscure is the Preface that not all previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but “divers stolen copies” are denounced. Mr. Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).

Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from manuscripts. Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the texts were given to the press by Shakespeare’s Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain, that “we have strong prima facie evidence that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the Stationers’ Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.” [150 - Pollard, ut supra, p. 10.]

The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed texts were good, but says that “divers” of them were stolen and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing (p. vi), says, “We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author’s manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and surreptitious.” I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface denounces all the Quartos. It could be truly said that divers stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on “abused” purchasers, and really no more is said. Dr. Furness writes, “When we now find them using as ‘copy’ one of these very Quartos” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1600), “we need not impute to them a wilful falsehood if we suppose that in using what they knew had been printed from the original text, howsoever obtained, they held it to be the same as the manuscript itself.. ” That was their meaning, I think, the Quarto of Much Ado had not been “maimed” and “deformed,” as divers other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.

Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his Company. I presume that his play was thus the common good of his Company and himself. If they sold a copy to the press, the price would go into their common stock; unless they, in good will, allowed the author to pocket the money.

It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition. They write, “The natural inference to be drawn from this statement” (in the Preface) “is that all the separate editions of Shakespeare’s plays were ‘stolen,’ ‘surreptitious’ and imperfect, and that all those published in the Folio were printed from the author’s own manuscripts” (my italics). The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard, whose learned opinion coincides with my own.

Perhaps it should be said that I reached my own construction of the sense of this passage in the Preface by the light of nature, before Mr. Pollard’s valuable book, based on the widest and most minute research, came into my hands. By the results of that research he backs his opinion (and mine), that some of the quartos are surreptitious and bad, while others are good “and were honestly obtained.” [151 - Pollard, ut supra, pp. 64–80.] The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain maimed and disfigured texts. The Preface draws a distinction to this effect, “even those” (even the stolen and deformed copies) “are now cured and perfect in their limbs,” – that is, have been carefully edited, while “all the rest” are “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare’s own holograph copies.

Among the plays spoken of as “all the rest,” namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have, moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon, Julius Cæsar, All’s Well, and Henry VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever Shakespeare thought, “he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare’s own handwriting. After “as he conceived them,” it goes on, “Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

This may be meant to suggest, but does not affirm, that the actors have “all the rest” of the plays in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. They may have, or may have had, some of his manuscripts, and believed that other manuscripts accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words. Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have everywhere left themselves loopholes and ways of evasion and escape. It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, “the rest” of the plays.

These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors thought accurate, and some may have been “fair copies” in Shakespeare’s own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his prima cura, his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free from blot or erasion. In one case at least, Shelley’s first draft of a poem is described as like a marsh of reeds in water, with wild ducks, but he made very elegant fair copies for the press.) Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this Preface, in accordance with the wishes and instructions of the two actors who sign it. He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received from Shakespeare. He remarks, in his posthumously published Discoveries (notes, memories, brief essays), “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.” And Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.

As to the sources of such plays as had been “maimed and deformed by injurious impostors,” and are now “offered cur’d and perfect of their limbs,” “it can be proved to demonstration,” say the Cambridge Editors, “that several plays in the Folio were printed from earlier quarto editions” (but the players secured a retreat on this point), “and that in other cases the quarto is more correctly printed, or from a better manuscript than the Folio text, and therefore of higher authority.” Hamlet, in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, “differs for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty places.”

Can the wit of man suggest any other explanation than that the editing of the Folio was carelessly done; out of the best quartos and MSS. in the theatre for acting purposes, and, – if the players did not lie in what they “often said,” and if they kept the originals, – out of some MSS. received from Shakspere? Whether the two players themselves threw into the press, after some hasty botchings, whatever materials they had, or whether they employed an Editor, a very wretched Editor, or Editors, or whether the great Author, Bacon, himself was his own Editor, the preparation of a text was infamously done. The two actors, probably, I think, never read through the proof-sheets, and took the word of the man whom they employed to edit their materials, for gospel. The editing of the Folio is so exquisitely careless that twelve printer’s errors in a quarto of 1622, of Richard III, appear in the Folio of 1623. Again, the Merry Wives of the Folio, is nearly twice as long as the quarto of 1619, yet keeps old errors.

How can we explain the reckless retention of errors, and also the large additions and improvements? Did the true author (Bacon or Bungay) now edit his work, add much matter, and go wrong forty-seven times where the quarto was right, and go right twenty times when the quarto was wrong? Did he, for the Folio of 1623, nearly double The Merry Wives in extent, and also leave all the errors of the fourth quarto uncorrected?

In that case how negligent was Bacon of his immortal works! Now Bacon was a scholar, and this absurd conduct cannot be imputed, I hope, to him.

Mr. Pollard is much more lenient than his fellow-scholars towards the Editor or Editors of the Folio. He concludes that “manuscript copies of the plays were easily procurable.” Sixteen out of the thirty-six plays existed in quartos. Eight of the sixteen were not used for the Folio; five were used, “with additions, corrections, or alterations” (which must have been made from manuscripts). Three quartos only were reprinted as they stood. The Editors greatly preferred to use manuscript copies; and showed this, Mr. Pollard thinks, by placing plays, never before printed, in the most salient parts of the three sets of dramas in their book. [152 - Pollard, ut supra, pp. 121–124.] They did make an attempt to divide their plays into Acts and Scenes, whereas the quartos, as a general rule, had been undivided. But the Editors, I must say, had not the energy to carry out their good intentions fully – or Bacon or Bungay, if the author, wearied in well-doing. The work is least ill done in the Comedies, and grows worse and worse as the Editor, or Bacon, or Bungay becomes intolerably slack.