第89章

Shakspear's veyne.' Judge Webb does not cite these passages, which identify Shakspeare (or Shakespeare) with the poet of 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Romeo and Juliet.'

In the second 'Returne,' Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and clown of Shakespeare's company, are introduced. 'Few of the University men pen plays well,' says Kemp; 'they smack too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare' (fellow is used in the sense of companion), 'puts them all downe, ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.'

At Burbage's request, one of the University men then recites two lines of 'Richard III.,' by the poet of his company.

Ben, according to Judge Webb, 'bewrayed his credit' in 'The Poetaster,' 1601-1602, where Pantalabus 'was meant for Shakspere.'*

If so, Pantalabus is described as one who 'pens high, lofty, and in a new stalking strain,' and if Shakespeare is the Poet Ape of Jonson's epigram, why then Jonson regards him as a writer, not merely as an actor. No amount of evil that angry Ben could utter about the plays, while Shakespeare lived, and, perhaps, was for a time at odds with him, can obliterate the praises which the same Ben wrote in his milder mood. The charge against Poet Ape is a charge of plagiarism, such as unpopular authors usually make against those who are popular. Judge Webb has to suppose that Jonson, when he storms, raves against some 'works' at that time somehow associated with Shakespeare; and that, when he praises, he praises the divine masterpieces of Bacon. But we know what plays really were attributed to Shakespeare, then as now, while no other 'works' of a contemptible character, attributed to Shakespeare, are to be heard of anywhere. Judge Webb does not pretend to know what the things were to which the angry Jonson referred.** If he really aimed his stupid epigram at Shakespeare, he obviously alluded to the works which were then, and now are, recognised as Shakespeare's; but in his wrath he denounced them. 'Potter is jealous of potter, poet of poet'--it is an old saying of the Greek. There was perhaps some bitterness between Jonson and Shakespeare about 1601; Ben made an angry epigram, perhaps against Shakespeare, and thought it good enough to appear in his collected epigrams in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death. By that time the application to Shakespeare, if to him the epigram applied, might, in Ben's opinion perhaps, be forgotten by readers. In any case, Ben, according to Drummond of Hawthornden, was one who preferred his jest to his friend.

*Webb, pp. 114-116.

**Webb, pp. 116-119.

Judge Webb's hypothesis is that Ben, in Shakespeare's lifetime, especially in 1600-1601, spoke evil of his works, though he allowed that they might endure to 'after-times'--

Aftertimes May judge it to be his, as well as ours.

But these works (wholly unknown) were not (on the Judge's theory) the works which, after Shakespeare's death, Ben praised, as his, in verse; and, more critically, praised in prose: the works, that is, which the world has always regarded as Shakespeare's. THESE were Bacon's, and Ben knew it on Judge Webb's theory. Here Judge Webb has, of course, to deal with Ben's explicit declarations, in the First Folio, that the works which he praises are by Shakespeare.

The portrait, says Ben, Was for gentle Shakespeare cut.

Judge Webb then assures us, to escape this quandary, that 'in the Sonnets "the gentle Shakespeare himself informs us that Shakespeare was not his real name, but the "noted weed" in which he "kept invention."'* The author of the Sonnets does nothing of the kind.

Judge Webb has merely misconstrued his text. The passage which he so quaintly misinterprets occurs in Sonnet lxxvi.:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?

So far from variation or quick change?

Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?

WHY WRITE I STILL ALL ONE, EVER THE SAME, AND KEEP INVENTION IN A NOTED WEED, THAT EVERY WORD DOES ALMOST TELL MY NAME, SHOWING THEIR BIRTH AND WHENCE THEY DO PROCEED?

Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument;

So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent:

For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.

*Webb, pp. 125,156,235,264. Judge Webb is fond of his discovery.

The lines capitalised are thus explained by the Judge: 'Here the author certainly intimates that Shakespeare is not his real name, and that he was fearful lest his real name should be discovered.'