did, which Heywood clearly thought less than honest.
As an author who was also an actor, and a shareholder in his company, Will’s interests were the same as theirs. It is therefore curious that some of his pieces were early printed, in quartos, from very good copies; while others appeared in very bad copies, clearly surreptitious. Probably the company gave a good MS. copy, sometimes, to a printer who offered satisfactory terms, after the gloss of novelty was off the acted play. 35 In any case, we see that the custom and interests of the owners of manuscript plays ran contrary to their early publication. In 1619 even Ben Jonson, who loved publication, told Drummond that half of his comedies were still unprinted.
These times were not as our own, and must not be judged by ours. Whoever wrote the plays, the actor, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon; whoever legally owned the manuscripts, was equally incurious and negligent about the preservation of a correct text. As we shall see later, while Baconians urge without any evidence that Bacon himself edited, or gave to Ben Jonson the duty of editing, the first collected edition (1623), the work has been done in an indescribably negligent and reckless manner, and, as Mr. Greenwood repeatedly states, the edition, in his opinion, contains at least two plays not by his “Shakespeare” – that “concealed poet” – and masses of “non-Shakespearean” work.
How this could happen, if Bacon (as on one hypothesis) either revised the plays himself, or entrusted the task to so strict an Editor as Ben Jonson, I cannot imagine. This is also one of the difficulties in Mr. Greenwood’s theory. Thus we cannot argue, “if the actor were the author, he must have been conscious of his great powers. Therefore the actor cannot have been the author, for the actor wholly neglected to collect his printed and to print his manuscript works.”
This argument is equally potent against the authorship of the plays by Bacon. He, too, left the manuscripts unpublished till 1623. “But he could not avow his authorship,” cry Baconians, giving various exquisite reasons. Indeed, if Bacon were the author, he might not care to divulge his long association with “a cry of players,” and a man like Will of Stratford. But he had no occasion to avow it. He had merely to suggest to the players, through any safe channel, that they should collect and publish the works of their old friend Will Shakspere.
Thus indifferent was the main author of the plays, whether he were actor or statesman; and the actor, at least, is not to blame for the chaos of the first collected edition, made while he was in his grave, and while Bacon was busy in revising and superintending Latin translations of his works on scientific subjects.
We now understand why there are so few contemporary records of Shakspere the man; and see that the neglect of his texts was extreme, whether or not he were the author. The neglect was characteristic of the playwrights of his own and the next generation. In those days it was no marvel; few cared. Nine years passed before a second edition of the collected plays appeared: thirty-two years went by before a third edition was issued – years of war and tumult, yet they saw the posthumous publication of the collected plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.
There remains one more mystery connected with publication. When the first collected edition of the plays appeared, it purported to contain “All His Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.” According to the postulate of the Baconians it was edited by the Author, or by Jonson acting for him. It contains several plays which, according to many critics, are not the author’s. This, if true, is mysterious, and so is the fact that a few plays were published, as by Shakespeare, in the lifetime both of the actor and of Bacon; plays which neither acknowledged for his own, for we hear of no remonstrance from – whoever “William Shakespeare” was. It is impossible for me to say why there was no remonstrance.
Suppose that Will merely supplied Bacon’s plays, under his own name, with a slight difference in spelling, to his company. It was as much his interest, in that case, to protest when Bacon’s pen-name was taken in vain, as if he had spelled his own surname with an a in the second syllable.
There is another instance which Mr. Greenwood discusses twice. 36 In 1599 Jaggard published “The Passionate Pilgrim; W. Shakespeare.” Out of twenty poems, five only were by W. S. In 1612, Jaggard added two poems by Tom Heywood, retaining W. Shakespeare’s name as sole author. “Heywood protested” in print, “and stated that Shakespeare was offended, and,” says Mr. Greenwood, “very probably he was so; but as he was, so I conceive, ‘a concealed poet,’ writing under a nom de plume, he seems to have only made known his annoyance through the medium of Heywood.”
If so, Heywood knew who the concealed poet was. Turning to pp. 348, 349, we find Mr. Greenwood repeating the same story, with this addition, that the author of the poems published by Jaggard, “to do himself right, hath since published them in his own name.” That is, W. Shakespeare has since published under his own name such pieces of The Passionate Pilgrim as are his own. “The author, I know,” adds Heywood, “was much offended with Mr. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”
Why was the author so slack when Jaggard, in 1599, published W. S.’s poems with others not by W. S.?
How can anyone explain, by any theory? It was as open to him in 1599 as in 1612 to publish his own pieces under his own name, or pen-name.
“Here we observe,” says Mr. Greenwood, 37 “that Heywood does nothing to identify ‘the author with the player.’” This is, we shall see, the eternal argument. Why should Heywood, speaking of W. Shakespeare, explain what all the world knew? There was no other W. Shakespeare (with or without the e and a) but one, the actor, in the world of letters of Elizabeth and James. Who the author was Heywood himself has told us, elsewhere: the author was – Will!
But why Shakespeare was so indifferent to the use of his name, or, when he was moved, acted so mildly, it is not for me or anyone to explain. We do not know the nature of the circumstances in detail; we do not know that the poet saw hopes of stopping the sale of the works falsely attributed to him. I do not even feel certain that he had not a finger in some of them. Knowing so little, a more soaring wit than mine might fly to the explanation that “Shakespeare” was the “nom de plume” of Bacon or his unknown equivalent, and that he preferred to “let sleeping dogs lie,” or, as Mr. Greenwood might quote the Latin tag, said ne moveas Camarinam.
III
THAT IMPOSSIBLE HE – THE SCHOOLING OF SHAKESPEARE
The banner-cry of the Baconians is the word “Impossible!” It is impossible that the actor from Stratford (as they think of him, a bookless, untutored lad, speaking in patois) should have possessed the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by the author of the plays and poems. It is impossible that at the little Free School of Stratford (if he attended it), he should have gained his wide knowledge of the literatures of Greece and Rome. To these arguments, the orthodox Stratfordian is apt to reply, that he finds in the plays and poems plenty of inaccurate general information on classical subjects, information in which the whole literature of England then abounded. He also finds in the plays some knowledge of certain Latin authors, which cannot be proved to have been translated at the date when Shakespeare drew on them. How much Latin Shakespeare knew, in our opinion, will presently be explained.
But, in reply to the Baconians and the Anti-Willians, we must say that while the author of the plays had some lore which scholars also possessed, he did not use his knowledge like a scholar. We do not see how a scholar could make, as the scansion of his blank verse proves that the author did make, the second syllable of the name of Posthumus, in Cymbeline, long. He must have read a famous line in Horace thus, which could scarce ’scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School. In the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus short, equally impossible.
“Eheu
On this see Mr. Pollard’s
