Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was much concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in France, and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good government of his native country. He could only aid that cause by the favour of Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament, where, despite his desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen. He was obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and polemical literature, as were set him by people in power. With these three great objects filling his heart, inspiring his ambition, and occupying his energies and time, we cannot easily believe, without direct external evidence, that he, or any mortal, could have leisure and detachment from his main objects (to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient to enable him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.

Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might have penned sonnets to his mistress’s eyebrow, he reports that he wrote “his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which he called Temporis Partus Maximus, ‘The Greatest Birth of Time,’” and “we need not doubt that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to do.” [233 - Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 31.] For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer (of which I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man’s hours. In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long pamphlet, “Touching the Controversies of the Church of England.” [234 - Ibid., vol. i. pp. 74–95.] He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof that he wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost! By 1591–2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy. He was apparently hard at scientific work. “I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are.” He adds, “The contemplative planet carries me away wholly,” and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls “vast contemplative ends.” These he proceeds to describe: he does not mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece (1594), nor of comedies! “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period. “If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries.. This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be removed.” If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, “.. and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth.. ” [235 - Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. pp. 108–109.] Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.

Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, “my Lord Treasurer Burghley.” What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman’s philanthropy, and “vast speculative ends” (how modern it all is!), and the rest of it? But just because Bacon, at thirty-one, is so extremely “green,” going to “take all knowledge for his province” (if some one will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation of science. Surely no Baconian will deny it! Being so deeply in earnest, taking his “study and meditation” so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and Adonis, and whatever plays of the period, – say, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, Part I, – are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians. Of course my view is merely personal or “subjective.” The Baconians’ view is also “subjective.” I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative aims: – what he says that he desires to do, in science, is what he did, as far as he was able. His other desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit. There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for competition in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor.

You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument is unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter to Cecil. Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast literary aim. They must take his alternative – to be “some sorry bookmaker, or a pioneer in that mine of truth,” as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of a company of players, or the founder of a regenerating philosophy. But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called “bookmakers,” for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them from appearing as printed books. If Bacon by “bookmaker” meant “playwright,” he put a modest value on his poetical work!

Meanwhile (1591–2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful, and famous Essex, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much excellent advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was not taken. It is not a novel suggestion, that Essex is the young man to whom Bacon is so passionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. “I applied myself to him” (that is, to Essex), says Bacon, “in a manner which, I think, happeneth rarely among men.” The poet of the Sonnets applies himself to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily) “happeneth rarely among men.”

It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon’s life. But, if you pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Essex, you find that he does not speak openly of a tenderly passionate attachment to that young man; not more than this, “I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and memorials of anything that might concern his Lordship’s honour, fortune, or service.” [236 - Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, edited by James Spedding, vol. i. p. 106.] As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591–2), he had no great leisure for writing poetry and plays. Moreover, speaking as a poet, in the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion to Essex into the symbolism of his passionate verse. Was Essex then a married man? If so, the Sonneteer’s insistence on his marrying must be symbolical of – anything else you please.

We know that Bacon, at this period, “did nothing” but “ruminate” about Essex. The words are his own! (1604). No plays, no Venus and Adonis, nothing but enthusiastic service of Essex and the Sonnets. Mr. Spedding, indeed, thinks that, to adorn some pageant of Essex (November 17, 1592), Bacon kindly contributed such matter as “Mr. Bacon in Praise of Knowledge” (containing his usual views about regenerating science), and “Mr. Bacon’s Discourse in Praise of his Sovereign.” [237 - Ibid., vol. i. pp. 121–143.] Both are excellent, though, for a Court festival, not very gay.

He also, very early in 1593, wrote an answer to Father Parson’s (?) famous indictment of Elizabeth’s Government, in Observations on a Libel. [238 - Sixty pages in Spedding’s Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, vol. i. pp. 146–208.] What with ruminating on Essex, and this essay, he was not solely devoted to Venus and Adonis and to furbishing-up old plays, though, no doubt, he may have unpacked his bosom in the Sonnets, and indulged his luscious imaginations in Venus and Adonis. I would not limit the potentialities of his genius. But, certainly, this amazing man was busy in quite other matters than poetry; not to mention his severe “study and meditation” on science.

All these activities of Bacon, in the year of Venus and Adonis, do not exhaust his exercises. Bacon, living laborious days, plunged into the debate in the Commons on Supply and fell into Elizabeth’s disgrace, and vainly competed with Coke for the Attorney-Generalship, and went on to write a pamphlet on the conspiracy of Lopez, and to try to gain the office of Solicitor-General, to manage Essex’s affairs, to plead at the Bar, to do Crown work as a lawyer, to urge his suit for the Solicitorship; to trifle with the composition of “Formularies and Elegancies” (January 1595), to write his Essays, to try for the Mastership of the Rolls, to struggle with the affairs of the doomed Essex (1600–1), while always “labouring in secret” at that vast aim of the reorganisation of natural science, which ever preoccupied him, he says, and distracted his attention from his practice and from affairs of State. [239 - See his statement (1603), Spedding, iii. pp. 84–87.] Of these State affairs the projected Union with Scotland was the most onerous. He was also writing The Advancement of Learning (1605). “I do confess,” he wrote to Sir Thomas Bodley, “since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done.” [240 - Ibid., iii. p. 253.] His mind was with his beloved Reformation of Learning: this came between him and his legal, his political labours, his pamphlet-writing, and his private schemes and suits. To this burden of Atlas the Baconians add the vamping-up of old plays for Shakespeare’s company, and the inditing of new plays, poems, and the Sonnets. Even without this considerable addition to his tasks, Bacon is wonderful enough, but with it – he needs the sturdy faith of the Rationalist to accept him and his plot – to write plays under the pseudonym of “William Shakespeare.”

Talk of miracles as things which do not happen! The activities of Bacon from 1591 to 1605; the strain on that man’s mind and heart, – especially his heart, when we remember that he had to prosecute his passionately adored Essex to the death; all this makes it seem, to me, improbable that, as Mrs. Pott and her school of Baconians hold, he lived to be at least a hundred and six, if not much older. No wonder that he turned to tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and saw life en noir: man delighted him not, nor woman either.

The occupations, and, even more, the scientific preoccupation of Bacon, do not make his authorship of the plays a physical impossibility. But they make it an intellectual miracle. Perhaps I may be allowed to set off this marvel against that other portent, Will Shakspere’s knowledge and frequent use of terms of Law. [241 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 371–406.] I do not pretend to understand how Will came to have them at the tip of his pen. Thus it may be argued that the Sonnets are by Bacon and no other man, because the Law is so familiar to the author, and his legal terms are always used with so nice an accuracy, that only Bacon can have been capable of these mysterious productions. (But why was Bacon so wofully inaccurate in points of scholarship and history?)

By precisely the same argument Lord Penzance proves that Bacon (not Ben, as Mr. Greenwood holds) wrote for the players the Dedication of the Folio. [242 - The Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy, p. 198.] “If it should be the case that Francis Bacon wrote the plays, he would, probably, afterwards have written the Dedication of the Folio, and the style of it” (stuffed with terms of law) “would be accounted for.” Mr. Greenwood thinks that Jonson wrote the Dedication; so Ben, too, was fond of using legal terms in literature. “Legal terms abounded in all plays and poems of the period,” says Sir Sidney Lee, and Mr. Greenwood pounces on the word “all.” [243 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 391.] However he says, “We must admit that this use of legal jargon is frequently found in lay-writers, poets, and others of the Elizabethan period – in sonnets for example, where it seems to us intolerable.” Examples are given from Barnabe Barnes. [244 - Ibid., pp. 408–410.] The lawyers all agree, however, that Shakespeare does the legal style “more natural,” and more accurately than the rest. And yet I cannot even argue that, if he did use legal terms at all, he would be sure to do it pretty well.

For on this point of Will’s use of legal phraseology I frankly profess myself entirely at a loss. To use it in poetry was part of the worse side of taste at that period. The lawyers with one voice declare that Will’s use of it is copious and correct, and that their “mystery” is difficult, their jargon hard to master; “there is nothing so dangerous,” wrote Lord Campbell, “as for one not of the craft to tamper with our freemasonry.” I have not tampered with it. Perhaps a man of genius who found it interesting might have learned the technical terms more readily than lawyers deem possible. But Will, so accurate in his legal terms, is so inaccurate on many other points; for example, in civil and natural history, and in classic lore. Mr. Greenwood proves him to be totally at sea as a naturalist. On the habits of bees, for example, “his natural history of the insect is as limited as it is inaccurate.” [245 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 425.] Virgil, though not a Lord Avebury, was a great entomologist, compared with Will. About the cuckoo Will was recklessly misinformed. His Natural History was folklore, or was taken from that great mediæval storehouse of absurdities, the popular work of Pliny. “He went to contemporary error or antiquated fancy for his facts, not to nature,” says a critic quoted by Mr. Greenwood. [246 - Ibid., p. 431.] Was that worthy of Bacon?

All these charges against le vieux Williams (as Théophile Gautier calls our Will) I admit. But Will was no Bacon; Will had not “taken all knowledge for his province.” Bacon, I hope, had not neglected Bees! Thus the problem, why is Will accurate in his legal terminology, and reckless of accuracy in quantity, in history, in classic matters, is not by me to be solved. I can only surmise that from curiosity, or for some other unknown reason, he had read law-books, or drawn information from Templars about the meaning of their jargon, and that, for once, he was technically accurate.

We have now passed in review the chief Baconian and Anti-Willian arguments against Will Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and poems. Their chief argument for Bacon is aut Diabolus, aut Franciscus, which, freely interpreted, means, “If Bacon is not the author, who the devil is?”

We reply, that man is the author (in the main) to whom the works are attributed by every voice of his own generation which mentions them, namely, the only William Shakespeare that, from 1593 to the early years of the second decade of the following century, held a prominent place in the world of the drama. His authorship is explicitly vouched for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one of Henslowe’s “hands,” and lived into the Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within, and his “mellifluous Shakespeare” is “Will,” as his Beaumont was “Frank,” his Marlowe “Kit,” his Fletcher, “Jack.” The author of Daiphantus (1604), mentioning the popularity of Hamlet, styles it “one of friendly Shakespeare’s tragedies.” Shakespeare, to him, was our Will clearly, a man of known and friendly character. The other authors of allusions did not need to say who their “Shakespeare” was, any more than they needed to say who Marlowe or any other poet was. We have examined the possibly unprecedented argument which demands that they who mention Shakespeare as the poet must, if they would enlighten us, add explicitly that he is also the actor.

“But all may have been deceived” by the long conspiracy of the astute Bacon, or the Nameless One. To believe this possible, considering the eager and suspicious jealousy and volubility of rival playwrights, is to be credulous indeed. The Baconians, representing Will almost as incapable of the use of pen and ink as “the old hermit of Prague,” destroy their own case. A Will who had to make his mark, like his father, could not pose as an author even to the call-boy of his company. Mr. Greenwood’s bookless Will, with some crumbs of Latin, and some power of “bumbasting out a blank verse,” is a rather less impossible pretender, indeed; but why and when did the speaker of patois, the bookless one, write blank verse, from 1592 onwards, and where are his blank verses? Where are the “works” of Poet-Ape? As to the man, even Will by tradition, whatever it may be worth, he was “a handsome, well-shaped man; very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant, smooth wit.” To his fellow-actors he was “so worthy a friend and fellow” (associate). To Jonson, “he was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed so freely that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.” If Jonson here refers, as I suppose he does, to his conversation, it had that extraordinary affluence of thoughts, each mating itself with as remarkable originality of richly figured expressions, which is so characteristic of the style of Shakespeare’s plays. In this prodigality he was remote indeed from the style of the Greeks; “panting Time toils after him in vain,” and even the reader, much more the listener, might say, sufflaminandus est; “he needs to have the brake put on.” [247 - Sufflamen is the “drag” or “brake.” Ben’s, “it was necessary he should be stopped,” is an incorrect translation.]

Such, according to unimpeachable evidence, was Will. Only despair can venture the sad suggestion that, under the name of Shakespeare, Ben is here speaking of Bacon, as “falling into those things which could not escape laughter.. which were ridiculous.” But to this last poor shift and fantastic guess were the Anti-Willians and Baconians reduced.

Such was Shakespeare, according to a rival.

But it is “impossible” that a man should have known so much, especially of classical literature and courtly ways, and foreign manners and phrases, if he had no more, at most, than four or five years at a Latin school, and five or six years in that forcing-house of faculty, the London of the stage, in the flush of the triumph over the Armada.

“With innumerable sorts of English books and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished,” says a contemporary. [248 - Quoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, p. 65.] If a doubter will look at the cheap and common books of that day (a play in quarto, and the Sonnets of Shakespeare, when new, were sold for fippence) in any great collection; he will not marvel that to a lover of books, poor as he might be, many were accessible. Such a man cannot be kept from books.

If the reader will look into “the translations and imitations of the classics which poured from the press.. the poems and love-pamphlets and plays of the University wits” (when these chanced to be printed), “the tracts and dialogues in the prevailing taste,” [249 - Ibid., p. 65.] he will understand the literary soil in which the genius of Shakespeare blossomed as rapidly as the flowers in “Adonis’ garden.” The whole literature was, to an extent which we find tedious, saturated with classical myths, anecdotes, philosophic dicta– a world of knowledge of a kind then “in widest commonalty spread,” but now so much forgotten that, to Baconians and the public, such lore seems recondite learning.

The gallants who haunted the stage, and such University wits as could get the money, or had talent (like Crichton) to “dispute their way through Europe,” made the Italian tour, and, notoriously, were “Italianate.” They would not be chary of reminiscences of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Actors visited Denmark and Germany. No man at home was far to seek for knowledge of Elsinore, the mysterious Venetian “tranect or common ferry,” the gondolas, and the Rialto. There was no lack of soldiers fresh and voluble from the foreign wars. Only dullards, or the unthinking, can be surprised by the ease with which a quick-witted man, having some knowledge of Latin, can learn to read a novel in French, Italian, or Spanish. That Shakespeare was the very reverse of a dullard, of the clod of Baconian fancy, is proved by the fact that he was thought capable of his works. For courtly manners he had the literary convention and Lyly’s Court Comedies, with what he saw when playing at the Court and in the houses of the great. As to untaught nobility of manners, there came to the Court of France in 1429, from a small pig-breeding village on the marches of Lorraine, one whose manners were deemed of exquisite grace, propriety, and charm, by all who saw and heard her: of her manners and swift wit and repartee, the official record of her trial bears concordant evidence. Other untaught gifts she possessed, and the historic record is unimpeached as regards that child of genius, Jeanne d’Arc.

“Ne me dites jamais cette bête de mot, impossible,” said Napoleon: it is indeed a stupid word where genius is concerned.

If intellectual “miracles” were impossible to genius, even Bacon could not have been and done all that he was and did, and also the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems; even Ben could not have been the scholar that he was. For the rest, I need not return on my tracks and explain once more such shallow mysteries as the “Silence of Philip Henslowe,” and the lack of literary anecdotage about Shakespeare in a stupendously illiterate country town. Had Will, not Ben, visited Drummond of Hawthornden, we should have matter enough of the kind desired.

“We have the epics of Homer,” people say, “what matters it whether they be by a Man, or by a Syndicate that was in business through seven centuries? We have the plays of Shakespeare, what matters it whether he, or Bacon, or X. were, in the main, the author?”

It matters to us, if we hold such doubts to be fantastic pedantries, such guesses contrary to the nature of things; while we wish to give love and praise and gratitude where they are due; to that Achæan “Father of the rest”; and to “friendly Shakespeare.”

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

“TROILUS AND CRESSIDA”

To myself Troilus and Cressida is, with Henry VI, Part I, the most mysterious among the Shakespearean plays. Here we find, if Will wrote it, or had any hand in it, the greatest poet of the modern world in touch with the heroes of the greatest poet of the ancient world; but the English author’s eyes are dimmed by the mists and dust of post-Homeric perversions of the Tale of Troy. The work of perversion began, we know, in the eighth century before our era, when, by the author of the Cypria, these favourite heroes of Homer, Odysseus and Diomede, were represented as scoundrels, assassins, and cowards.

In the Prologue to the play (whosoever wrote it) we see that the writer is no scholar. He makes the Achæan fleet muster in “the port of Athens,” of all places. Even Ovid gave the Homeric trysting-place, Aulis, in Bœotia. (This Prologue is not in the Folio of 1623.) Six gates hath the Englishman’s Troy, and the Scæan is not one of them.

The loves of Troilus and Cressida, with Pandarus as go-between, are from the mediæval Troy books, and were wholly unknown to Homer, whose Pandarus is only notable for loosing a traitor’s shaft at Menelaus, in time of truce, and for his death at the hand of Diomede. The play begins after the duel (Iliad, III) between Paris and Menelaus: in the play, not in Homer, Paris “retires hurt,” as is at first reported. Hector has a special grudge against the Telamonian Aias. As in the Iliad there is a view of the Achæans, taken from the walls by Priam and Helen; so, in the play, Pandarus and Cressida review the Trojans re-entering the city. Paris turns out not to be hurt after all.

In Act i. Scene 3, the Achæans hold council, and regret the disaffection of Achilles. Here comes Ulysses’ great speech on discipline, in armies, and in states, the gradations of rank and duty; commonly thought to be a leaf in Shakespeare’s crown of bays. The speeches of Agamemnon and Nestor are dignified; indeed the poet treats Agamemnon much more kindly than Homer is wont to do. But the poet represents Achilles as laughing in his quarters at Patroclus’s imitation of the cough and other infirmities of old Nestor, to which Homer, naturally, never alludes. Throughout, the English poet regards Achilles with the eyes of his most infamous late Greek and ignorant mediæval detractors. The Homeric sequence of events is so far preserved that, on the day of the duel between Paris and Menelaus, comes (through Æneas) the challenge by Hector to fight any Greek in “gentle and joyous passage of arms” (Iliad, VII). As in the Iliad, the Greeks decide by lot who is to oppose Hector; but by the contrivance of Odysseus (not by chance, as in Homer) the lot falls on Aias. In the Iliad Aias is as strong and sympathetic as Porthos in Les Trois Mousquetaires. The play makes him as great an eater of beef, and as stupid as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Achilles, save in a passage quite out of accord with the rest of the piece, is nearly as dull as Aias, is discourteous, and is cowardly! No poet and no scholar who knew Homer’s heroes in Homer’s Greek, could thus degrade them; and the whole of the revilings of Thersites are loathsome in their profusion of filthy thoughts. It does not follow that Will did not write the part of Thersites. Some of the most beautiful and Shakespearean pieces of verse adorn the play; one would say that no man but Will could have written them. Troilus and Cressida, at first, appear “to dally with the innocence of love”; and nothing can be nobler and more dramatic than the lines in which Cressida, compelled to go to her father, Calchas, in the Greek camp, in exchange for Antenor, professes her loyalty in love. But the Homeric and the alien later elements, – the story of false love, – cannot be successfully combined. The poet, whoever he was, appears to weary and to break down. He ends, indeed, as the Iliad ends, with the death of Hector, but Hector, in the play, is murdered, while resting unarmed, without shield and helmet, after stripping a suit of sumptuous mail from a nameless runaway. In the play he has slain Patroclus, but has not stripped him of the armour of Achilles, which, in Homer, he is wearing. Achilles then meets Hector, but far from rushing to avenge on him Patroclus, he retires like a coward, musters his men, and makes them surround and slay the defenceless Hector.

Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a day becomes “the sluttish spoil of opportunity,” and of Diomede, and the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o’ love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector. Yet there seemed to be muffled notes from the music, and broken lights from the splendour of Homer. When Achilles eyes Hector all over, during a truce, and insultingly says that he is thinking in what part of his body he shall drive the spear, we are reminded of Iliad, XXII, 320–326, where Achilles searches his own armour, worn by Patroclus, stripped by Hector from him, and worn by Hector, for a chink in the mail. Yet, after all, these points are taken, not from the Iliad, but from Caxton’s popular Troy Book.

Once more, when Hector is dead, and Achilles bids his men

“cry amain,
Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain,”

to we think of Iliad, XXII, 390–393, where Achilles commands the Myrmidons to go singing the pæan

“Glory have we won, we have slain great Hector!”

The sumptuous armour stripped by Hector from a nameless man, recalls his winning of the arms of Achilles from Patroclus. But, in fact, this passage is also borrowed, with the murder of Hector, from Caxton, except as regards the pæan.

It may be worth noting that Chapman’s first instalment of his translation of the Iliad, containing Books I, II, and VII–XI, appeared in 1598, and thence the author could adapt the passages from Iliad, Book VII. In or about 1598–9 occurred, in Histriomastix, by Marston and others, a burlesque speech in which Troilus, addressing Cressida, speaks of “thy knight,” who “Shakes his furious Speare,” while in April 1599, Henslowe’s account-book contains entries of money paid to Dekker and Chettle for a play on Troilus and Cressida, for the Earl of Nottingham’s Company. [250 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 358–362.] Of this play no more is known, nor can we be sure that Chapman’s seven Books of the Iliad (I, II, VII–XI) of 1598 attracted the attention of playwrights, from Shakespeare to Chettle and Dekker, to Trojan affairs. The coincidences at least are curious. If “Shakes his furious Speare” in Histriomastix refers to Shakespeare in connection with Cressida, while, in 1599, Dekker and Chettle were doing a Troilus and Cressida for a company not Shakespeare’s, then there were two Troilus and Cressida in the field. A licence to print a Troilus and Cressida was obtained in 1602–3, but the quarto of our play, the Shakespearean play, is of 1609, “as it is acted by my Lord Chamberlain’s men,” that is, by Shakespeare’s Company. Now Dekker and Chettle wrote, apparently, for Lord Nottingham’s Company. One quarto of 1609 declares, in a Preface, that the play has “never been staled with the stage”; another edition of the same year, from the same publishers, has not the Preface, but declares that the piece “was acted by the King’s Majesty’s servants at the Globe.” [251 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 491–494.] The author of the Preface (Ben Jonson, Mr. Greenwood thinks, [252 - Ibid., p. 495.]) speaks only of a single author, who has written other admirable comedies. “When he is gone, and his comedies out of sale, you will scramble for them, and set up a new English Inquisition.” Why? The whole affair is a puzzle. But if the author of the Preface is right about the single author of Troilus and Cressida, and if Shakespeare is alluded to in connection with Cressida, in Histriomastix (1599), then it appears to me that Shakespeare, in 1598–9, after Chapman’s portion of the Iliad appeared, was author of one Troilus and Cressida, extant in 1602–3 (when its publication was barred till the publisher “got authority”), while Chettle and Dekker, in April 1599, were busy with another Troilus and Cressida, as why should they not be? In an age so lax about copyright, if their play was of their own original making, are we to suppose that there was copyright in the names of the leading persons of the piece, Troilus and Cressida?

Perhaps not: but meanwhile Mr. Greenwood cites Judge Stotsenburg’s opinion [253 - Ibid., pp. 358–360.] that Henslowe’s entries of April 1599 “refute the Shakespearean claim to the authorship of Troilus and Cressida,” which exhibits “the collaboration of two men,” as “leading commentators” hold that it does. But the learned Judge mentions as a conceivable alternative that “there were two plays on the subject with the same name,” and, really, it looks as if there were! The Judge does not agree “with Webb and other gifted writers that Bacon wrote this play.” So far the Court is quite with him. He goes on however, “It was, in my opinion, based on the foregoing facts, originally the production of Dekker and Chettle, added to and philosophically dressed by Francis Bacon.” But, according to Mr. Greenwood, “it is admitted not only that the different writing of two authors is apparent in the Folio play, but also that ‘Shakespeare’ must have had at least some share in a play of Troilus and Cressida as early as the very year 1599, in the spring of which Dekker and Chettle are found engaged in writing their play of that name,” on the evidence of Histriomastix. [254 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 361.] How that evidence proves that “a play of Troilus and Cressida had been published as by ‘Shakespeare’ about 1599,” I know not. Perhaps “published” means “acted”? “And it is not unreasonable to suppose that this play” (“published as by Shakespeare”) “was the one to which Henslowe alludes” – as being written in April 1599, by Dekker and Chettle.

If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker, Chettle, and “Shakespeare,” the Great Unknown, or Bacon. He collaborates with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham’s men (according to Sir Sidney Lee), [255 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 360.] but it is, later at least, played by Shakespeare’s company; and perhaps Bacon gets none of the £4 paid [256 - Ibid., p. 358.] to Dekker and Chettle. Henslowe does not record his sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to Shakespeare’s or to any company or purchaser. Without an entry of the careful Henslowe recording his receipts for the sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser, it is not easy to see how Shakespeare’s company procured the manuscript, and thus enabled him to refashion it. Perhaps no reader will fail to recognise his hand in the beautiful blank verse of many passages. I am not familiar enough with the works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable passages. Thersites is beastly: a Yahoo of Swift’s might poison with such phrases as his the name and nature of love, loyalty, and military courage. But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he may have written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim of “a daughter of the game,” and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles. If Shakespeare read the books translated by Chapman, he must have read them in the same spirit as Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry of the Achæan could not be combined with the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he knew them in the mediæval books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate and Caxton. The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not follow. Probably Will looked on the play as one of his failures. The Editor, if we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly that it is not paged, and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.

“The Grand Possessors” of the play referred to in the Preface to one of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare’s Company. In this case the owners would not permit the publication of the play if they could prevent it. The title provokes Mr. Greenwood to say, “Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent; indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous.” [257 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 495, note I.] Of course, if the players were the possessors, “grand” is merely a jeer, by a person advertising a successful piracy. And in regard to Tieck’s conjecture that James I is alluded to as “the grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly written,” [258 - Ibid., p. 494.] the autocratic James was very capable of protecting himself against larcenous publishers.

APPENDIX II

CHETTLE’S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE

In discussing contemporary allusions to William Shakspere or Shakespeare (or however you spell the name), I have not relied on Chettle’s remarks (in Kind-Hart’s Dreame, 1592) concerning Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. Chettle speaks of it, saying, “in which a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken.” It appears that by “one or two” Chettle means two. “With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted” (at the time when he edited the Groatsworth), “and with one of them I care not if I never be.” We do not know who “the Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance,” addressed by Greene, were. They are usually supposed to have been Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, or Nash. We do not know which of the two who take offence is the man with whom Chettle did not care to be acquainted. Of “the other,” according to Chettle, “myself have seen his demeanour no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes” (that is, “in his profession,” as we say), “besides divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty; and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.”

Speaking from his own observation, Chettle avers that the person of whom he speaks is civil in his demeanour, and (apparently) that he is “excellent in the quality he professes” – in his profession. Speaking on the evidence of “divers of worship,” the same man is said to possess “facetious grace in writing.” Had his writings been then published, Chettle, a bookish man, would have read them and formed his own opinion. Works of Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe had been published. Writing is not “the quality he professes,” is not the “profession” of the man to whom Chettle refers. On the other hand, the profession of Greene’s “Quondam acquaintance” was writing, “they spend their wits in making Plays.” Thus the man who wrote, but whose profession was not that of writing, does not, so far, appear to have been one of those addressed by Greene. It seems undeniable that Greene addresses gentlemen who are “playmakers,” who “spend their wits in making Plays,” and who are not actors; for Greene’s purpose is to warn them against the rich, ungrateful actors. If Greene’s friends, at the moment when he wrote, were, or if any one of them then was, by profession an actor, Greene’s warning to him against actors, directed to an actor, is not, to me, intelligible. But Mr. Greenwood writes, “As I have shown, George Peele was one of the playwrights addressed by Greene, and Peele was a successful player as well as playwright, and might quite truly have been alluded to both as having ‘facetious grace in writing,’ and being ‘excellent in the quality he professed,’ that is, as a professional actor.” [259 - Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 69.]

I confess that I did not know that George Peele, M.A., of Oxford, had ever been a player, and a successful player. But one may ask, – in 1592 did George Peele “profess the quality” of an actor; was he then a professional actor, and only an occasional playwright? If so, I am not apt to believe that Greene seriously advised him not to put faith in the members of his own profession. From them, as a successful member of their profession (a profession which, as Greene complains, “exploited” dramatic authors), Peele stood in no danger. Thus I do not see how Chettle’s professional actor, reported to have facetious grace in writing, can be identified with Peele. The identification seems to me impossible. Peele and Marlowe, in 1592, were literary gentlemen; Lodge, in 1592, was filibustering, though a literary man; he had not yet become a physician. In 1592, none of the three had any profession but that of literature, so far as I am aware. The man who had a special profession, and also wrote, was not one of these three; nor was he Tom Nash, a mere literary gentleman, pamphleteer and playwright.

I do not know the name of any one of the three to whom Greene addressed the Groatsworth, though the atheistic writer of tragedies seems meant, and disgracefully meant, for Marlowe. I only know that Chettle is expressing his regrets for Greene’s language to some one whom he applauded as to his exercise of his profession; and who, according to “divers of worship,” had also “facetious grace in writing.” “Myself have seen him no less civil than he is excellent in the quality he professes”; whether or not this means that Chettle has seen his excellence in his profession, I cannot tell for certain; but Chettle’s remark is, at least, contrasted with what he gives merely from report – “the facetious grace in writing” of the man in question. His writing is not part of his profession, so he is not, in 1592 (I conceive), Lodge, Peele, Marlowe, or Nash.