Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

(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, [216 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 475.] 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.” [217 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 106.]

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. [218 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 478.]) 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 Cæsar, one speaking to him, ‘Cæsar, thou dost me wrong.’ He replied, ‘Cæsar 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 Cæsar, – 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.” [219 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 480.]

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 [220 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.] “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.” [221 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.]

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. [222 - Ibid., pp. 489–490.] 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, [223 - See chapter XI, The First Folio.] 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,” [224 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 483.] and the passage on Ben’s visits to Bacon in 1621–3, [225 - Ibid., pp. 489–491.] 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” [226 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 486.] 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 Cæsar’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, [227 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 488.] 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.” [228 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 491.] 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,” [229 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 295, cf. p. 499.] 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, [230 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 295, 499.] 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.” [231 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 499.]

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.

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.” [232 - Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 4 (1861).] The vocation, the idea, the object, were not poetical.