Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

According to “all tradition,” says Mr. Greenwood, Shakespeare was taken from school at the age of thirteen. Those late long-descended traditions of Shakespeare’s youth are of little value as evidence; but, if it pleases Mr. Greenwood, I will, for the sake of argument, accept the whole of them. Assuredly I shall not arbitrarily choose among the traditions: all depends on the genealogical steps by which they reach us, as far as these can be discovered. [48 - See chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.]

According to the tattle of Aubrey the antiquary, publishing in 1680, an opinion concerning Shakspere’s education reached him. It came thus; there had been an actor in Shakspere’s company, one Phillips, who, dying in 1605, left to Shakspere the usual thirty-shilling piece of gold; and the same “to my servant, Christopher Beeston.” Christopher’s son, William, in 1640, became deputy to Davenant in the management of “the King’s and Queen’s Young Company”, and through Beeston, according to Aubrey, Davenant learned; through Beeston Aubrey learned, that Shakespeare “understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger days a school-master in the country.” Aubrey writes that “old Mr. Beeston, whom Mr. Dryden calls ‘the chronicle of the stage,’” died in 1682. [49 - See C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, pp. 48, 343–8.]

This is a fair example of the genealogy of the traditions. Phillips, a friend of Shakspere, dies in 1605, leaving a servant, Christopher Beeston (he, too, was a versifier), whose son, William, dies in 1682; he is “the chronicle of the stage.” Through him Davenant gets the story, through him Aubrey gets the story, that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and had been a rural dominie. Mr. Greenwood [50 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 207–9.] devotes much space to disparaging Aubrey (and I do not think him a scientific authority, moult s’en faut), but Mr. Greenwood here says not a word as to the steps in the descent of the tradition. He frequently repeats himself, thereby forcing me to more iteration than I like. He had already disparaged Aubrey in note I to p. 105, but there he approached so closely to historical method as to say that “Aubrey quotes Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, as his authority.” On p. 209 he dismisses the anecdote (which does not suit his book) as “a mere myth.” “He knows, he knows” which traditions are mythical, and which possess a certain historical value.

My own opinion is that Shakspere did “know Latin pretty well,” and was no scholar, as his contemporaries reckoned scholarship. He left school, if tradition speak true, by a year later than the age, twelve, when Bacon went to Cambridge. Will, a clever kind of lad (on my theory), left school at an age when some other clever lads became freshmen. Why not? Gilbert Burnet (of whom you may have heard as Bishop of Salisbury under William III) took his degree at the age of fourteen.

Taking Shakspere as an extremely quick, imaginative boy, with nothing to learn but Latin, and by the readiest road, the colloquial, I conceive him to have discovered that, in Ovid especially, were to be found the most wonderful and delightful stories, and poetry which could not but please his “green unknowing youth.” In the years before he left Stratford, and after he left school (1577–87?), I can easily suppose that he was not always butchering calves, poaching, and making love; and that, if he could get books in no other way, this graceless fellow might be detected on a summer evening, knitting his brows over the stories and jests of the chained Ovid and Plautus on his old schoolroom desk. Moi qui parle, I am no genius; but stories, romance, and humour would certainly have dragged me back to the old desks – if better might not be, and why not Shakspere? Put yourself in his place, if you have ever been a lad, and if, as a lad, you liked to steal away into the world of romance, into fairyland.

If Will wrote the plays, he (and indeed whoever wrote the plays) was a marvel of genius. But I am not here claiming for him genius, but merely stating my opinion that if he were fond of stories and romance, had no English books of poetry and romance, and had acquired as much power of reading Latin as a lively, curious boy could easily gain in four years of exclusively Latin education, he might continue his studies as he pleased, yet be, so far, no prodigy.

I am contemplating Will in the conditions on which the Baconians insist; if they will indeed let us assume that for a few years he was at a Latin school. I credit the graceless loon with the curiosity, the prompt acquisitiveness, the love of poetry and romance, which the author of the plays must have possessed in youth. “Tradition says nothing of all that,” the Baconian answers, and he may now, if he likes, turn to my reply in The Traditional Shakespeare. [51 - Chapter X, infra.] Meanwhile, how can you expect old clerks and sextons, a century after date, in a place where literature was not of supreme interest, to retain a tradition that Will used to read sometimes (if he did), in circumstances of privacy? As far as I am able to judge, had I been a boy at Stratford school for four years, had been taught nothing but Latin, and had little or no access to English books of poetry and romance, I should have acquired about the same amount of Latin as I suppose Shakspere to have possessed. Yet I could scarcely, like him, have made the second syllable in “Posthumus” long! Sir Walter Scott, however, was guilty of similar false quantities: he and Shakspere were about equally scholarly.

I suppose, then, that Shakspere’s “small Latin” (as Jonson called it) enabled him to read in the works of the Roman clerks; to read sufficient for his uses. As a fact, he made use of English translations, and also of Latin texts. Scholars like Bacon do not use bad translations of easy Latin authors. If Bacon wanted Plutarch, he went to Plutarch in Greek, not to an English translation of a French translation of a Latin translation.

Some works of Shakespeare, the Lucrece, for example, and The Comedy of Errors (if he were not working over an earlier canvas from a more learned hand), and other passages, show knowledge of Latin texts which in his day had not appeared in published translations, or had not been translated at all as far as we know. In my opinion Will had Latin enough to puzzle out the sense of the Latin, never difficult, for himself. He could also “get a construe,” when in London, or help in reading, from a more academic acquaintance: or buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor scholar. No contemporary calls him scholarly; the generation of men who were small boys when he died held him for no scholar. The current English literature of his day was saturated with every kind of classical information; its readers, even if Latinless, knew, or might know a world of lore with which the modern man is seldom acquainted. The ignorant Baconian marvels: the classically educated Baconian who is not familiar with Elizabethan literature is amazed. Really there is nothing worthy of their wonder.

Does any contemporary literary allusion to Shakespeare call him “learned”? He is “sweet,” “honey-tongued,” “mellifluous,” and so forth, but I ask for any contemporary who flattered him with the compliment of “learned.” What Ben Jonson thought of his learning (but Ben’s standard was very high), what Milton and Fuller, boys of eight when he died, thought of his learning, we know. They thought him “Fancy’s child” (Milton) and with no claims to scholarship (Fuller), with “small Latin and less Greek” (Jonson). They speak of Shakespeare the author and actor; not yet had any man divided the persons.

Elizabethan and Jacobean scholarly poets were widely read in the classics. They were not usually, however, scholars in the same sense as our modern scholarly poets and men of letters; such as Mr. Swinburne among the dead, and Mr. Mackail and Sir Gilbert Murray – if I may be pardoned for mentioning contemporary names. But Elizabethan scholarly poets, and Milton, never regarded Shakespeare as learned. Perhaps few modern men of letters who are scholars differ from them. The opinion of Mr. Collins is to be discussed presently, but even he thought Shakespeare’s scholarship “inexact,” as we shall see.

I conceive that Shakspere “knew Latin pretty well,” and, on Ben Jonson’s evidence, he knew “less Greek.” That he knew any Greek is surprising. Apparently he did, to judge from Ben’s words. My attitude must, to the Baconians, seem frivolous, vexatious, and evasive. I cannot pretend to know what was Shakspere’s precise amount of proficiency in Latin when he was writing the plays. That between his own knowledge, and construes given to him, he might easily get at the meaning of all the Latin, not yet translated, which he certainly knew, I believe.

Mr. Greenwood says “the amount of reading which the lad Shakspere must have done, and assimilated, during his brief sojourn at the Free School is positively amazing.” [52 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, p. 96.] But I have shown how an imaginative boy, with little or no access to English poetry and romances, might continue to read Latin “for human pleasure” after he left school. As a professional writer, in a London where Latinists were as common as now they are rare in literary society, he might read more, and be helped in his reading. Any clever man might do as much, not to speak of a man of genius. “And yet, alas, there is no record or tradition of all this prodigious industry… ” I am not speaking of “prodigious industry,” and of that – at school. In a region so non-literary as, by his account, was Stratford, Mr. Greenwood ought not to expect traditions of Will’s early reading (even if he studied much more deeply than I have supposed) to exist, from fifty to seventy years after Will was dead, in the memories of the sons and grandsons of country people who cared for none of these things. The thing is not reasonable. [53 - See chapter X, The Traditional Shakespeare.]

Let me take one example [54 - The Shakespeare Problem Restated, pp. 94–96.] of what Mr. E. A. Sonnenschein is quoted as saying (somewhere) about Shakespeare’s debt to Seneca’s then untranslated paper De Clementia (1, 3, 3; I, 7, 2; I, 6, I). It inspires Portia’s speech about Mercy. Here I give a version of the Latin.

“Clemency becometh, of all men, none more than the King or chief magistrate (principem).. No one can think of anything more becoming to a ruler than clemency.. which will be confessed the fairer and more goodly in proportion as it is exhibited in the higher office.. But if the placable and just gods punish not instantly with their thunderbolts the sins of the powerful, how much more just it is that a man set over men should gently exercise his power. What? Holds not he the place nearest to the gods, who, bearing himself like the gods, is kind, and generous, and uses his power for the better?.. Think.. what a lone desert and waste Rome would be, were nothing left, and none, save such as a severe judge would absolve.”

The last sentence is fitted with this parallel in Portia’s speech:

“Consider this
That in the course of Justice none of us
Should see salvation.”

Here, at least, Protestant theology, not Seneca, inspires Portia’s eloquence.

Now take Portia:

“The quality of Mercy is not strain’d;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;”

(Not much Seneca, so far!)

“’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But Mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice.. ”

There follows the passage about none of us seeing salvation, already cited, and theological in origin.

Whether Shakespeare could or could not have written these reflections, without having read Seneca’s De Clementia, whether, if he could not conceive the ideas “out of his own head,” he might not hear Seneca’s words translated in a sermon, or in conversation, or read them cited in an English book, each reader must decide for himself. Nor do I doubt that Shakespeare could pick out what he wanted from the Latin if he cast his eye over the essay of the tutor of Nero.

My view of Shakespeare’s Latinity is much like that of Sir Walter Raleigh. [55 - Shakespeare, pp. 38–40.] As far as I am aware, it is the opinion usually held by people who approach the subject, and who have had a classical education. An exception was the late Mr. Churton Collins, whose ideas are discussed in the following chapter.

In his youth, and in the country, Will could do what Hogg and Burns did (and Hogg had no education at all; he was self-taught, even in writing). Will could pick up traditional, oral, popular literature. “His plays,” says Sir Walter Raleigh, “are extraordinarily rich in the floating debris of popular literature, – scraps and tags and broken ends of songs and ballads and romances and proverbs. In this respect he is notable even among his contemporaries… Edgar and Iago, Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool in Lear and the Grave-digger in Hamlet, even Ophelia and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs… ” [56 - Raleigh, Shakespeare, pp. 77, 78.] He is rich in rural proverbs not recorded in Bacon’s Promus.

Shakespeare in the country, like Scott in Liddesdale, “was making himself all the time.”

The Baconian will exclaim that Bacon was familiar with many now obsolete rural words. Bacon, too, may have had a memory rich in all the tags of song, ballad, story, and dicton. But so may Shakespeare.

IV

MR. COLLINS ON SHAKESPEARE’S LEARNING

That Shakspere, whether “scholar” or not, had a very wide and deep knowledge both of Roman literature and, still more, of the whole field of the tragic literature of Athens, is a theory which Mr. Greenwood seems to admire in that “violent Stratfordian,” Mr. Churton Collins. [57 - So he seems to me to do; but in Vindicators of Shakespeare, p. 135, he shows great caution: “I refer the reader to Mr. Collin’s essay, and ask him to judge for himself.”] I think that Mr. Collins did not persuade classical scholars who have never given a thought to the Baconian belief, but who consider on their merits the questions: Does Shakespeare show wide classical knowledge? Does he use his knowledge as a scholar would use it?

My friend, Mr. Collins, as I may have to say again, was a very wide reader of poetry, with a memory like Macaulay’s. It was his native tendency to find coincidences in poetic passages (which, to some, to me for example, did not often seem coincidental); and to explain coincidences by conscious or subconscious borrowing. One remarked in him these tendencies long before he wrote on the classical acquirements of Shakespeare.

While Mr. Collins tended to account for similarities in the work of authors by borrowing, my tendency was to explain them as undesigned coincidences. The question is of the widest range. Some inquirers explain the often minute coincidences in myths, popular tales, proverbs, and riddles, found all over the world, by diffusion from a single centre (usually India). Others, like myself, do not deny cases of transmission, but in other cases see spontaneous and independent, though coincident invention. I do not believe that the Arunta of Central Australia borrowed from Plutarch the central feature of the myth of Isis and Osiris.

It is not on Shakespeare’s use, now and then, of Greek and Latin models and sources, but on coincidences detected by Mr. Collins himself, and not earlier remarked, that he bases his belief in the saturation of Shakespeare’s mind with Roman and Athenian literature. Consequently we can only do justice to Mr. Collins’s system, if we compare example after example of his supposed instances of Shakespeare’s borrowing. This is a long and irksome task; and the only fair plan is for the reader to peruse Mr. Collins’s Studies in Shakespeare, compare the Greek and Roman texts, and weigh each example of supposed borrowing for himself. Baconians must delight in this labour.

I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays of Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the Menæchmi as the model of The Comedy of Errors. He does not borrow phrases from it, as he does from North’s Plutarch.

Venus and Adonis owes to Ovid, at most, but ideas for three purple patches, scattered in different parts of the Metamorphoses. Lucrece is based on the then untranslated Fasti of Ovid. I do not think Shakespeare incapable of reading such easy Latin for himself; or too proud to ask help from a friend, or buy it from some poor young University man in London. That is a simple and natural means by which he could help himself when in search of a subject for a play or poem; and ought not to be overlooked.

Mr. Collins, in his rapturous account of Shakespeare’s wide and profound knowledge of the classics, opens with the remark: “Nothing which Shakespeare has left us warrants us in pronouncing with certainty that he read the Greek classics in the original, or even that he possessed enough Greek to follow the Latin versions of those classics in the Greek text.” [58 - Studies in Shakespeare, p. 15.] In that case, how did Shakespeare’s English become contaminated, as Mr. Collins says it did, with Greek idioms, while he only knew the Greek plays through Latin translations?

However this is to be answered, Mr. Collins proceeds to prove Shakespeare’s close familiarity with Latin and with Greek dramatic literature by a method of which he knows the perils – “it is always perilous to infer direct imitation from parallel passages which may be mere coincidences.” [59 - Studies in Shakespeare, p. 21.] Yet this method is what he practises throughout; with what amount of success every reader must judge for himself.

He thinks it “surely not unlikely” that Polonius’s may be a terse reminiscence of seven lines in Plautus (Trinummus, iv. 3). Why, Polonius is a coiner of commonplaces, and if ever there were a well-known reflection from experience it is this of the borrowers and lenders.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,”

Next, take this of Plautus (Pseudolus, I, iv. 7–10), “But just as the poet when he has taken up his tablets seeks what exists nowhere among men, and yet finds it, and makes that like truth which is mere fiction.” We are to take this as the possible germ of Theseus’s theory of the origin of the belief in fairies:

“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing