What, not mediocria firma from thy spite?
(Sat. IV, 77)
That is to say: “What, did not even mediocria firma escape thy spite?”—or we might translate: “What, was not even mediocria safe (firma) from thy spite?”
“Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for a writer, and one who had been attacked by Hall. And who was that writer? Of this there can, surely, be no doubt. “Mediocria firma” was Bacon’s motto, and we find it engraved over the well-known portrait of Franciscus Baconus Baro de Verulam, which appears at the commencement of his Sylva Sylvarum. Moreover, it is a motto which has never been used except by the Earls of Verulam or the Bacon family. “Mediocria firma,” therefore, stands for Bacon. But is “Mediocria firma” identical with “Labeo”?
Well, “Labeo,” as used by Marston, stands for the author of Venus and Adonis. Of that, I think, there can be no doubt. And Hall’s “Labeo,” the elusive author of a lascivious poem, who writes under a pseudonym and who is always prepared to shift the responsibility upon somebody else, seems eminently characteristic of Francis Bacon. And it is Bacon, under the guise of “Mediocria firma,” the spiteful attacks upon whom in Hall’s Satires are deprecated by Marston. In fine, it seems to be eminently probable, though it cannot be said to be absolutely proved, that “Labeo” and “Mediocria firma” are one and the same.
The above is but a brief outline of the argument put before his readers by the late Walter Begley, and I have no space to elaborate it further in this note. I should like, however, to add one final word. If Bacon was the author of Venus and Adonis, then he was also the author of Lucrece. Well, for myself, I should not be at all surprised to find that he was, in fact, the author of that long, wearisome, tedious, and pedantic poem, where the outraged matron, “après avoir été violée autant qu’on peut l’être,” like Candide’s Cunegonde, and “pausing for means to mourn some newer way,” at last “calls to mind where hangs a piece of skilful painting, made for Priam’s Troy,” the contemplation of which leads to a prolonged train of reflection concerning Ajax and Ulysses, Paris and Helen, Hector and Troilus, Priam and Hecuba, etc., etc., all of which is singularly out of place in the mouth of Tarquin’s unhappy victim. Nor would I, in this connection, omit to refer to that long and curious and unwanted passage concerning heraldry which we find in an earlier part of the poem (lines 54-72), and upon which Mr. George Wyndham remarks that: “Whenever Shakespeare in an age of technical conceit indulges in one ostentatiously, it will always be found that his apparent obscurity arises from our not crediting him with a technical knowledge which he undoubtedly possessed, be it of heraldry, of law, or philosophic disputation.”
Here, in conclusion, I would advert to a passage in this stilted poem which is curiously illustrative of “Shakespeare’s knowledge of a not generally known custom among the ancient Romans.” When Tarquin has forced an entry into the chamber of Lucrece, we read: “Night wandering weasels shriek to see him there,”—a line which for a long time puzzled all the commentators. For what could weasels be doing in Collatine’s house or in Lucrece’s chamber? At last, however, some scholar directed attention to the note on Juvenal’s Satire XV, 7, in Mayor’s edition, where we learn that some animal of the weasel tribe was kept by the Romans in their houses for some purpose or another; and referring to Facciolati’s Dictionary, we read: “Mustela, γαλὴ, animal quadrupes parvum sed oblongum, flavi coloris, muribus, columbis, gallinis infestum. Duo autem sunt genera: alterum, domesticum quod in domibus nostris oberrat, et catulos suos, ut auctor est Cicero, quotidie transfert, mutatque sedem, serpentes persequitur,” etc.
The Romans then, it seems, had no knowledge of the domestic cat, and had domesticated an animal of the weasel tribe which they kept in the house to kill mice or it might be snakes, and for other purposes. Now, this is just the sort of out-of-the-way and recondite information which Bacon would have delighted in. But does any sane and reasonable man suppose that Will Shakspere of Stratford had ever heard of the “night-wandering weasel” in an ancient Roman house? The Baconian authorship of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and, I would add, the Sonnets, may be rejected as “not proven,” but the idea that these works were written by the player who came to London as a “Stratford rustic” in 1587, is surely one of the most foolish delusions that have ever obsessed and deceived the credulous mind of man. O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora cæca!
THE END.
Cahill & Co., Ltd., London, Dublin and Drogheda.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Letters of Henry James. Macmillan, 1920, Vol. I., p. 432.