For shame! write better, Labeo, or write none;
Or betterwrite, or, Labeo, write alone.
(Bk. II, Sat. 1)
and he ends this satire thus:
For shame! write cleanly, Labeo, or write none.
From these lines we may infer, as Mr. Begley says, that Labeo did not write alone, but in conjunction with, or under cover of, another author, and also that he did not write “cleanly,” but in a lascivious style, such as the style of Venus and Adonis, it might be.
But there is a further passage in Hall’s Virgidemiæ (Book IV, Sat. 1) which I must quote:
Labeo is whipp’d and laughs me in the face:
Why? for I smite, and hide the galléd place.
Gird but the Cynick’s Helmet on his head,
Cares he for Talus or his flayle of lead?
Long as the crafty Cuttle lieth sure
In the black Cloude of his thick vomiture,
Who list complain of wrongéd faith or fame
When he may shift it to another’s name?
It would take too long if, in this note, I were to attempt the explanation of this “Sphinxian” passage, as Dr. Grosart called it, but the general meaning seems clear enough, viz.: “I, the Satirist, whip Labeo, but Labeo merely laughs at me, for he knows he can shift the blame, and the punishment, on to another whose name he makes use of, while he himself lies, like the Cuttle, in the Cloud of his own vomiture.”[116]
Then, writes Mr. Begley, “Labeo is the writer of Venus and Adonis; and as there is every reason to think that Marston used the name Labeo because Hall had used it, we are therefore able to infer that Hall and Marston both mean the same man. We, therefore, advance another step, and infer that the author of Venus and Adonis did not write alone, that he shifted his work to another’s name (certainly a Baconian characteristic), and acted like a cuttle-fish by interposing a dark cloud between himself and his pursuers.”
But what proof or evidence is there that Labeo stood for Bacon? Well, Marston’s Satires were published, with his “Pigmalion’s Image,” in 1598, several months after Hall’s first three books of Virgidemiæ had appeared, and in his Satire IV, entitled Reactio, Marston goes through pretty well the whole list of writers whom Hall had attacked, and defends them, but, curiously enough, he seems to take no notice of Hall’s attack on Labeo, though that attack was a marked and recurrent one. But, says Mr. Begley, “Labeo is there, but concealed in an ingenious way by Marston, and passed over in a line that few would notice or comprehend. But when it is noticed it becomes one of the most direct proofs we have on the Bacon-Shakespeare question, and, what is more, a genuine and undoubted contemporary proof.” What, then, is that proof? It is found in a line addressed by Marston to Hall: