Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown

prove that Will was recognised as the author, by Ben Jonson, Heywood, and Heminge and Condell the actors, to take the best witnesses. Meanwhile we have

Baconians and Mr. Greenwood describe, the contemporary witnesses cited must have detected Will in a day; and the story of the "Concealed Poet" who really, at first, did the additions and changes in the Company's older manuscript plays, and of the inconceivably

acious, even if he were able to copy in his scrawl the fine Roman hand of the concealed poet. I am surprised that the Baconians have never made that point. Will's "copy" was almost without blot or erasion, the other actors were wont to boast. Really the absence of erasions and corrections is too easily explaine

l. Their attempts take the shape of the most extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to Ben's various estimates of the merits of the

ties. Not very many literary allusions remain, made during Will's life-time, to the plays of Shakespeare. The writers, usually, speak of "Shakespeare," or "W. Shakespeare," or "Will Shakespeare," and leave it there. In the same way, when they speak of other contemporaries, they name them,-and leave it there, without telling us "who" (Frank) Bea

r the name of 'Shakespeare'; we should expect to find Shakespeare spoken of as a poet and a dramatist; we should expect, further, to find some few allusions to Shakespeare or Shakspere the player. And these, of course, we do find; but these are not the objects of our quest. What we require is evidence to establish the identity of the player with the poet and

h the world of letters and the Stage knew but one William Shakspere or Shakespeare, who was far too familiar to them to require further identification. But even if the makers of allusions did all this, and said, "by W. Shak

n. We have already seen one example of this argument, when Heywood speaks of the author of poems by Shakespeare, published in The Passionate Pilgrim. Heywood does nothing to identify the actor Shakspere with the author Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood. I shall prove that, elsewhere, Heywood does identif

illiam Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is my position. That they may all have been mistaken: that "William Shakespeare" was Bacon's, or any one's pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide away into it through an "at any rate"; as he does thre

the future of his work, which a Shakspere or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the company owning the play, may alter as he pleases. It is highly probable that the actors also acquired most of the popular renown, for, even now, playgoers have much to say about the players in a piece, while they seldom know the name of the playwright. Women fall in love with the actors, not with the authors; but with "those puppets," as Greene says, "that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished in our colours." Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of the same complaints,-most natural in the circumstances: though he managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know. Greene adds that in

mselves, a player, who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of yours" (including Marlowe's, probably). "The man is ready at their call" ("an absolute Johannes Factotum"). "In his own conceit" he is "the only Shake-scene in a

merely assailed with the other actors, his "fellows." But he is picked out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the players, "for there is" among themselves, "in a player's hide," "an upstart crow"-who

feathers," they have been bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; "yes, for they now have" an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellowship. Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he did. He says nothing about the sup

mself as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you," "do seem to have that implication," [141c] namely, that "S

d," [142a] concedes [142b] that it "certainly looks as if he" (Greene) "meant to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himsel

ke-scene is chosen out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more apt than the prof

ayer-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity. The term "the only Shake-scene" may be one of those curious coincidences which do occur. The presumption lies rather on the other side. I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling for his case says that, even assuming the validity of the surmise that there is an allusi

e again. "Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he i

ally indebted to another"? It is as an actor, with other actors, that the player is "beautified with our feathers,"-not with the feathers of some one not ourselves, Bacon or M

tolen." The "feathers," the words of the plays, were bought,

eaning "do not trust the players, for one of them writes blank verse which he thinks

rk, for which he was really indebted to another," this is "the utmost we should be entitled to say," even if the a

kespeare. Nobody can prove that it is; the pun may be a strange coincid

beautified with the feathers which he has stolen from the dramatic writers." Greene does not even remotely hint at plagiarism on the part of Shake-scene: and the feathers, the plays of Greene and his friends, were not stolen but bought. We must take Greene's evidence as we find it,-it proves that by "Shake-scene" he means a "poet-ape," a playwright-actor; for Greene, like Jonson, speaks of actors as "apes." Both men saw in a cer

ions can prove no more than that, by his contemporaries, Shakespeare was believed to be the poet, which is impossible if he were a mere rustic ignoramus, as the Baconians aver. Omitting some remarks by Chettle on Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, [146a] as, if grammar goes for all, they do no

wn" the University wits "and Ben Jonson too." The date is not earlier than that of Ben's satiric play on the poets, The Poetaster (1601), to which reference is made. Since Kempe is to be represented

recognises Shakespeare a

hat Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless rustic, for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an hour. Of course the Cambridge author only proves,

s "negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume is not apparent," says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method. I repeat that he wanders from the point, which is, here, that t

n sport." Freeman (1614) credits him with Venus and Lucrece. "Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander." I repeat Heywood's evidence. Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable domestic play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, was, from

akespeare whose

and passion, w

actor with the author? No quib

fter the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the stage throughout the action: and in very droll and dreadful situations. Did Will take the King's part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, "as some say"? Nobody knows. But Mr. Greenwood, to disable Davies's recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, "Our English Terence," quotes, from Florio's Montaigne, a silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence's plays were written by Scipio and Laelius. In fact, Terence alludes in his prologue to the Adelphi, to a spiteful report that he was aided by great persons. The prologue may be

works. Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when he makes Will incapable of writing. Such a Will could deceive no mortal. [150a] But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays "much learning, and remarkable classical attainments," o

Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608. Like Milton he was a Cambridge man. The First Folio of Shakespeare's works appeared when each of these two bookish men was aged fifteen. It would necessarily revive interest in Shakespeare, now first known as far as about half of his plays went: he would be discussed among lovers of literature at Cambridge. Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller's remark that Shakespeare's "learning was very little," that, if alive, he