It was, I believe, first put forward by the late Reverend Walter Begley, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, in his book, Is it Shakespeare?[114]—a work which every one interested in the Shakespeare problem ought to read, because it is replete with both information and amusement, and there is hardly a dull page in it. The argument is derived from the Satires of Marston and Hall, our early English satirists, of the sixteenth century, who wrote in bitter vein the one against the other. Both of them have a good deal to say concerning one Labeo, which is a pseudonym for some anonymous writer of the time. Now in 1598 Marston published a poem founded on the lines and model of Venus and Adonis, which he called “Pigmalion’s Image” (sic)—a love poem, not a satire—and as an appendix to it he wrote some lines “in prayse of his precedent Poem,” where “Pigmalion” had, according to the old legend, succeeded in bringing the image he had wrought out of ivory to life, and in this appendix occur the following lines:
And in the end (the end of love I wot),
Pigmalion hath a jolly boy begot.
So Labeo did complaine his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentlesse none;
Yet Lynceus knowes that in the end of this
He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.
Now compare the following lines from Venus and Adonis (199-200):
Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel—
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth.
Here we have Labeo’s complaint almost word for word, and we are reminded that at the end of Venus and Adonis there was the “strange metamorphosis” of Adonis into a flower, quite as strange as that of “Pigmalion’s Image.”
Is it not clear, then, that by Labeo is meant the author of Venus and Adonis? It may be said, of course, that it was not the author, but Venus who complained that Adonis was “obdurate, flinty,” and relentless, but that is a futile objection, for Marston evidently puts the words of Venus into Labeo’s mouth, and it can only be the author of the poem to whom he alludes.
Who, then, was Labeo? Well, “these University wits,” as Mr. Begley writes, “were steeped in Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, and thence brought forth a nickname whenever an occasion required it.” Now in Horace we read:
Labeone insanior inter
sanos dicatur.
and we learn that M. Antistius Labeo was a famous lawyer, who, it is said, by too much free speaking had offended the Emperor Augustus.[115]
But what more have we about this sixteenth century Labeo? Well, Bishop Hall in his satires mentions him several times, and reflects upon him as a licentious writer who takes care to preserve his anonymity, and, like the cuttle-fish, involves himself in a cloud of his own making. Thus in the second book of his satires, which he called (after Plautus) Virgidemiæ, i.e., a bundle of rods, Hall attacks Labeo in the following words: