which could scarce ’scape whipping, even at Stratford Free School. In the same way he makes the penultimate syllable of Andronicus short, equally impossible.
Mr. Greenwood, we shall see, denies to him Titus Andronicus, but also appears to credit it to him, as one of the older plays which he “revised, improved, and dressed,” [44a] and that is taken to have been all his “authorship” in several cases. A scholar would have corrected, not accepted, false quantities. In other cases, as when Greeks and Trojans cite Plato and Aristotle in Troilus and Cressida, while Plato and Aristotle lived more than a thousand years after the latest conceivable date of the siege of Troy, I cannot possibly suppose that a scholar would have permitted to himself the freak, any more than that in The Winter’s Tale he should have borrowed from an earlier novel the absurdity of calling Delphi “Delphos” (a non-existent word), of confusing “Delphos” with Delos, and placing the Delphian Oracle in an island. In the same play the author, quite needlessly, makes the artist Giulio Romano (1492–1546) contemporary with the flourishing age of the oracle of the Pythian Apollo. This, at least, would not be ignorance.
We have, I think, sufficient testimony to Ben’s inability to refrain from gibes at Shakspere’s want of scholarship. Rowe, who had traditions of Davenant’s, tells how, in conversation with Suckling, Davenant, Endymion Porter, and Hales of Eton, Ben harped on Will’s want of learning; and how Hales snubbed him. Indeed, Ben could have made mirth enough out of The Winter’s Tale. For, granting to Mr. Greenwood [45a] that “the mention of Delphos suggests the Bohemia of a much earlier date, and under the reign of Ottocar (1255–78) Bohemia extended from the Adriatic to the shores of the Baltic,” that only makes matters far worse. “Delphos” never was a place-name; there was no oracle on the isle of “Delphos”; there were no Oracles in 1255–78 (A.D.); and Perdita, who could have sat for her portrait to Giulio Romano, was contemporary with an Oracle at Delphos, but not with Ottocar.
There never was so mad a mixture, not even in Ivanhoe; not even in Kenilworth. Scott erred deliberately, as he says in his prefaces; but Will took the insular oracle of Delphos from Greene, inserted Giulio Romano “for his personal diversion,” never heard of Ottocar (no more than I), and made a delightful congeries of errors in gaiety of heart. Nobody shall convince me that Francis Bacon was so charmingly irresponsible; but I cannot speak so confidently of Mr. Greenwood’s Great Unknown, a severe scholar, but perhaps a frisky soul. There was no region called Bohemia when the Delphic oracle was in vigour;—this apology (apparently contrived by Sir Edward Sullivan) is the most comic of erudite reflections.
Some cruel critic has censured the lovely speech of Perdita, concerning the flowers which Proserpine let fall, when she was carried off by Dis. How could she, brought up in the hut of a Bohemian shepherd, know anything of the Rape of Proserpine? Why not, as she lived in the days of the Delphic Oracle—and Giulio Romano, and of printed ballads.
It is impossible, Baconians cry, that the rabbit-stealer, brought up among the Audreys and Jaquenettas of Warwickshire, should have created the noble and witty ladies of the Court; and known the style of his Armado; and understood how dukes and kings talk among themselves—usually in blank verse, it appears.
It is impossible that the home-keeping yokel should have heard of the “obscure” (sic!) Court of Navarre; and known that at Venice there was a place called the Rialto, and a “common ferry” called “the tranect.” It is impossible that he should have had “an intimate knowledge of the castle of Elsinore,” though an English troupe of actors visited Denmark in 1587. To Will all this knowledge was impossible; for these and many more exquisite reasons the yokel’s authorship of the plays is a physical impossibility. But scholars neither invent nor tolerate such strange liberties with time and place, with history, geography, and common sense. Will Shakspere either did not know what was right, or, more probably, did not care, and supposed, like Fielding in the old anecdote, that the audience “would not find it out.” How could a scholar do any of these things? He was as incapable of them as Ben Jonson. Such sins no scholar is inclined to; they have, for him, no temptations.
