Here it is to be observed that the proceeds of sale of the Shakespeare Folio, “printed at his admirers’ charge,” would help towards relieving the fallen man’s pecuniary distress, whilst the august compliment conveyed by the Masque would tend to soothe his lacerated feelings.
The attitude of a concealed poet to his art is rarely explicit, or concealment would be next to impossible. In this connection I ask leave to quote from an Essay, Shakespeare-Bacon, by E. W. S., published many years ago.[33] The essayist, after having stated that Bacon’s qualifications for dramatic work were of a high order, and that some at least of his recognised Elizabethan output actually were dramatic, runs on: “Moreover, curious as is Bacon’s manner when treating of ‘poesie,’ his manner when dealing with dramatic poetry is more curious still. The Advancement of Learning though not published till the reign of her successor, belongs to the age of Queen Elizabeth, in conception, observation, reflection, and substance generally. In this work, after having mapped out the “globe” of human knowledge into three great continents of which poetry is one, he finds himself face to face with dramatic poetry. Compelled to give the thing a name, he rejects the almost inevitable word dramatic, in favour of the distant word representative. And what he permits himself to say about ‘representative’ poetry, in that the natural, and appropriate place for saying it, seems intended to suggest—what of course was absurdly untrue—that he was all but a stranger to anything in the nature of a dramatic performance. The suggestion too is strangely out of keeping with passages of unexpected occurrence in other parts of the book. For instance, in handling what he calls the ‘Georgics of the mind,’ he describes poetry (along with history) in terms which so admirably characterise the very best dramatic poetry of the age, that it is difficult to resist the conviction that he must have been thinking chiefly of the masterpieces of Shakespeare. ‘In poetry,’ says he, ‘we may find painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves, how they work, how they vary, how they gather and fortify, how they are inwrapped one with another, and how they do fight and encounter one with another ... how to set affection against affection, and to master one by another; even as we use to hunt beast with beast,’ etc. Another of these unexpected passages seems to imply that Bacon, writing at the close of the Elizabethan epoch, was so convinced of the paramount importance of dramatic poetry, as to have forgotten that there was any poetry at all, except what had to do with the theatre. In this passage Bacon has been claiming that ‘for expressing the affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are more beholding to the poets than to the philosophers’—at this point he suddenly breaks off with an ironical: ‘But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre.’[34]
A question that has probably been intriguing some of my readers is: Why did Bacon abandon the poet’s Crown to which his genius entitled him? From among the complex of conceivable reasons it will suffice to pick out three. (1) In dedicating the De Augmentis Scientiarum to Prince Charles, 1623, Bacon writes: “It is a book I think will live, and be a citizen of the world which English books are not.” Again, a letter, of about the same date, to an intimate friend contains this passage: “For these modern languages will play the bank-rowtes with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad, as God shall give me leave, to recover it with posterity.” “Play the bank-rowtes” means, I suppose, put a stop to the currency; and “lost much time with this age” is probably an allusion to pseudonymous work. These and similar passages justify the conclusion that by this time Bacon had convinced himself that English as a literary language, was doomed to go under to Latin. (2) The poet in Bacon, as in Wordsworth and others, had expired with the passing of youth. (3) Bacon imagined himself the Discoverer of a New Instrument or method, by which human life would be so beatified that posterity would revere him as one of its greatest benefactors; if only men of science (such as Harvey) were for ever deprived of excuse for pooh-poohing the Novum Organum, merely because its inventor was none other than Shakespeare, sonneteer and dreamer of dreams.
[Note by the Editor]. There appears to be no doubt that in “Chronomastix” Jonson was lampooning George Wither, whose “Abuses Stript and Whipt, or Satiricall Essayes,” was published by Budge in 1622, (there had been an earlier edition in 1613) and was followed by a poem called “The Scourge.” In “Abuses Stript and Whipt” we find the following lines:
And though full loth, ’cause their ill natures urge,
I’ll send abroad a satire with a scourge,
That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,
And being naked in their vices whip them.
And to be sure of those that are most rash
Not one shall ’scape him that deserves the lash.
There is also an Epigram to “Time,” in which Wither asks:
Now swift-devouring, bald, and ill-fac’t Time,
Dost not thou blush to see thyself uncloak’t?
Another Epigram is to “Satyro-Mastix,” the last lines of which are:
Then scourge of Satyrs hold thy whip from mine,
Or I will make my rod lash thee and thine.
“Withers Motto” (1621) was “nec habeo nec careo nec curo.” This was satirised by John Taylor, the Water-Poet, in the words “et habeo, et careo, et curo,” and is obviously alluded to in Jonson’s Masque, where “Nose” says “The gentleman-like Satyre cares for nobody.”