To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy Booke and Fame;
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much.
Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise,
And thinke to ruine, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th’ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore, will begin, etc.
This emphatic disclaimer of any intention to draw envy, ill-will, discredit, on the august name Shakespeare, had a deep meaning, or Jonson would not have given it such prominence. It reads as if addressed to a living person, and the subsequent apostrophe, “Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,” chimes with this suggestion. The root difficulty of the passage lies in the obviously genuine conviction of the author that Shakespeare was in danger of being hurt by praise, noble, sincere and universally allowed to be just. As for the assertion that Shakespeare was “indeed above” the reach of harm, it is only pretence. Having dispatched this tiresome business, the eulogist lets himself go:
I therefore will begin, Soule of the Age!
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome,
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe.
* * * *
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy buskin tread,
And shake a Stage; Or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme.
Nature herselfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines.
. . . . . Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which, he seems to shake a Lance,
As brandish’t at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James.
But stay. I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there.
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or Influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which since thy flight fro’ hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but by thy Volumes Light.”
Passing by the half serious “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe”, we are pulled up by the line: “And though thou hadst small Latine,” etc. The internal evidence of his poems and plays proves that Shakespeare must have had a regular education, as distinguished from mere smatterings picked up in a village school of the sixteenth century. As to Latin in particular, the etymological intelligence shown in the handling of words derived from that language is almost conclusive. The evidence of contemporaries tells the same tale. “W.C.,” for instance, in Polimanteia (c. 1595) intimates that Shakespeare was a “schollar,” and a member of one of our “Universities.”[45] But there is no need to labour the point of Shakespeare’s culture. Indeed the innuendo of “small Latin” as applied to Shakespeare is sufficiently refuted by other passages in the Ode itself. “All scenes of Europe,” classico-historical as well as modern, owe him “homage.” He was another “Apollo”; each of his “well turned and true-filed lines” was sufficient to enlighten “ignorance.” What then are we to make of a jibe, apparently levelled at Shakespeare, that he was a quite unlettered rustic? Some years after the date of the Ode, and in order, as he says, to justify his “owne candor,” Jonson told “posterity” (as we shall see) that Shakespeare wrote with a “facility” so unbridled that he often blundered.[46] But even then, though his mood in the interval had veered right round from eulogist to candid critic, Jonson dropped no hint that Shakespeare lacked Latin or Greek. The jibe therefore, did not fit Shakespeare, but must have been made to the measure of some one else.
To continue our examination of the Ode. What can Jonson have meant by interspersing it with trashy jests upon the two syllables of the name (no longer august) Shakespeare? “Shake a stage”; “shake a lance, as brandished at the eyes of ignorance.” Was there something irresistibly funny about the name? Again, what sort of ignorance was threatened by the beauty and finish of Shakespeare’s lines? The ignorance of persons who for Shakespeare mistook a man untinctured with literature? The “Sweet Swan of Avon” apostrophe suggests comparison with what, in his Masque of Owles (1626), Jonson wrote about “Warwick Muses.” These charming creatures are there represented as inspired, not by “Pegasus,” but by a “Hoby-horse.”[47] Was this sarcasm reminiscent of the well-known lines which an Oxford graduate informs us were “ordered” by the Stratford man “to be cut upon his tombstone”? Certainly Pegasus was innocent of them. Here they are:
Good frend, for Jesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
To return to the Ode. The lines which follow the “Sweet Swan” apostrophe are deserving of notice, chiefly because they tell us that King James (as well as Queen Elizabeth) was under the spell of Shakespeare. Then comes the ejaculation: “But stay! I see thee in the hemisphere advanced, and made a constellation there.” Is it possible that Jonson expected his readers—such of them as were not in the secret—to follow him here? To behold Shakespeare, à la Berenice’s hair, translated into the constellation Cygnus? Not he; that were an order too large for credulity itself to honour. What Jonson had in his mind’s eye was not the starry heaven, but the British House of Peers.[48] Such is this famous Ode. It suffers from manœuvres, the object of which had to be kept dark; and this I take to be the reason for its exclusion from the second volume (1640) of Jonson’s Works, where it would have been quite at home amongst the Odes, Sonnets, Elegies and so forth, which go to make up that volume.
Turn we now to Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries, a work written years after the Ode and not printed till 1641, some three or four years after his death. These Discoveries consist in the main of passages lifted from Latin writers, notably Seneca the father (Controversiæ), and entered promiscuously in Jonson’s Commonplace books. The borrowings are often mutilated and always treated without ceremony. For our purpose it is the application, not the accuracy of translation that matters. In quoting from them I shall give italics and capital letters as they appear in the slovenly print (1641), of which I have several copies, one of which by the way is inscribed “J. P. Collier” on the title page. A Discovery concerning Poets, runs thus:
Nothing in our Age, I have observed, is more preposterous, than the running Judgments upon Poetry and Poets; when we shall heare those things ... cried up for the best writings, which a man would scarce vouchsafe to wrap any wholesome drug in; he would never light his Tobacco with them.... There are never wanting, that dare preferre the worst ... Poets:.... Nay, if it were put to the question of the Water-rimers workes, against Spencer’s, I doubt not but they [the Water-rimers’] would find more suffrages.