[24] Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”
[25] Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admiration of his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of the Sapientia Veterum, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.
[26] It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to his Apologie for Poetry (along with the Arte of English Poesie, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’s Apologie—odi profanum vulgus et arceo—touches the motto to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; that King Lear touches the Arcadia; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.
[27] It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in both Advancement and Apologie, that the Apologie endorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of the Apologie’s references to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. The Advancement disapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”
[28] Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered as arts, whilst poetry ranks as a science.
BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE[44]
Another exasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable? To answer offhand—Curiosity about the How of remarkable events is not likely to die out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: Without the aid of hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover, the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise—splendid praise—is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients—enigma, jest, make-believe—are commingled with the praise.
The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines: